China is not a twentieth century country; it is a 21st century country with 19th century characteristics

The poster and economist Noah Smith wrote a dumb post on why China is a twentieth century country. Needless to say, this is not the case. Though all countries today are 21st century countries, one can sometimes usefully think of countries as being more similar to other places’ past than their present. For instance, the seventeenth century Chinese Empire had some resemblances to the Roman Empire, more than contemporary Britain did, at least. However, Smith’s claim is still largely inapt even given this generous assumption.

The twentieth century was dominated by war and extraordinary levels of military mobilization. China is not warlike, having not invaded any country since the 1980s and having a very low military share of GDP. The twentieth century had fairly weak globalization. China is very globalized. The twentieth century had already built nations (Japan, France, Britain, etc.). China is still nation building; its promotion of 普通话 resembles that of the French government’s promotion of standard French during the nineteenth century. Likewise, the characters have conspired to keep China’s effective literacy at levels reached in Western Europe 100-150 years ago. Rising coal use was a nineteenth century phenomenon much more than a twentieth century one, and China’s automobile ownership lags well behind its GDP per capita. Of course, China is much more a twenty-first century nation than it is a nineteenth century nation. Its use of digital technology is unprecedented in any previous century. Its electric grid was already built up by the end of the twentieth century. Its assertiveness on the world stage is a product of a response to American imperialism more than of any other phenomenon, and its foreign relations are thoroughly shaped by post-1991 American dominance. Its infrastructure development is grander than anything that ever happened before in any other place on Earth, though obviously has both nineteenth and twentieth century precedents. Though its demographics are somewhat reminiscent of those of nineteenth century France, low fertility is a typical 21st century phenomenon across the majority of countries. China’s diplomacy is also characteristically twenty-first century, especially in its avoidance of military confrontation, though it has nineteenth century parallels (e.g., British investment in Latin America, the nineteenth century “long peace”).

The most twentieth century-like thing about China is its uncanny similarity of its patterns of economic, commercial, and infrastructure development to post-WWII Japan. The expansion of neither economy resulted in military aggression and both concentrated heavily on exports of electronics, boosting their own dollar price levels to unusual heights and greatly impacting American discussion in the process. Its use of re-education camps as a means of reforming the population is also a phenomenon most commonly found in the twentieth century, though has nineteenth century parallels (e.g., U.S. Indian reservations). Most importantly, however, China doesn’t look like any twentieth century country in particular. It’s not Nazi Germany. It’s neither prewar nor postwar Japan. It certainly doesn’t resemble Maoist China or the economically inflexible Soviet Union, and resembles Republican China only very weakly. It’s certainly not twentieth century America, France, or Britain, and China resembles today’s America a lot more than it did any previous manifestation of America. Its closest resemblance among relevant 20th century countries is to the 1870-1918 German Empire and to mid-20th century Portugal/Spain, but the former spent most of its time in the nineteenth century and the resemblance between China and the latter is still pretty weak. China remains fundamentally a 21st century country with some characteristics of previous centuries, especially the nineteenth.

Why the Chinese still use characters

The history of writing began in the late fourth millennium BC in Egypt and Iraq. In Egypt, the number of hieroglyphs was never never more than two thousand (1,071 hieroglyphs are in Unicode). In Iraq, the number of signs was on a similar order of magnitude; Unicode contains 922 cuneiform signs and that number fell over the course of the third millennium BC. Cuneiform was used as the primary international script of the Middle East during the mid-to-late second millennium BC, though this state disappeared by the early first millennium BC. The alphabet was invented in Egypt on the basis of Egyptian hieratic around one and a half millennia after the invention of writing, and, though not widely adopted in Egypt until the Persian conquest, spread to the Syro-Lebanese coast by the late second millennium BC and into South Arabia by the ninth century BC, and from there into Ethiopia. Due to the Syro-Lebanese coast’s strategic location, the Phoenician alphabet quickly spread across Syria and Palestine during the tenth century BC, and, by the eighth century BC, into Greece. The Latin script emerged from the Greek in the sixth century BC, and the runic script in northern Europe emerged from Latin around the time of Augustus. After the Persian conquest of Iraq, the migration of eastern Syrians into southern Iraq resulted in the disappearance of the Akkadian language and its replacement with Aramaic, written in a spinoff of the Phoenician alphabet. The Aramaic alphabet and language were adopted by the Achaemenids as the primary administrative language of their empire, resulting in the spread of the alphabet into India and Egypt. However, the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great resulted in a switch to the Greek language for administrative purposes, which became even more sustained with the Roman conquest. Experiments at writing Egyptian using the Greek alphabet began in the first century AD and Coptic proper, a language using large amounts of Greek vocabulary, became increasingly widely used in the third. Thus, by the time of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, hieroglyphic, hieratic, demotic, and cuneiform had all vanished from use, Egypt was under the rule of the Romans, and Iraq was under the rule of the Persians. The alphabet continued to spread Eastward into Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Tibet during the seventh century. By the ninth century, it had spread to the Philippines. The Arab conquest resulted in the Arabic script replicating much of the earlier movements of the alphabet across Eurasia.

The situation in East Asia was very different. The Chinese script started in the late second millennium BC already with more than 4000 characters, with each character standing for the meaning of one syllable (at this time, each Chinese word had only one syllable, polysyllabic words would be developed several hundred years later) and the number simply grew over time at a rate of about one character every two weeks (not a joke). Despite modern standard Mandarin containing less than 1200 syllables (far less than Middle Chinese), the government of China promulgates a list of 8105 “general standard” characters (and this was a substantial decline from the 80,000+ characters of the eighteenth century, 47035 in the 康熙字典) -some 6.8 characters per spoken syllable. Much like the Chinese spoken language contains many homonyms, so did China develop a writing system with numerous characters, many commonly used, that look almost identical.

Unlike the case with Iraq, the Chinese language was not replaced by that of any immigrant barbarians -rather, it expanded South into southern China and North into Manchuria. And unlike the case with Egypt, attempts at alphabetization by China’s barbarian conquerors were short-lived and half-hearted. The first attempt at a comprehensive alphabetization of Chinese (and all the other languages of the Empire) was under Kublai Khan, who promoted new 国字 in 1269 designed by the Tibetan monk Phagpa. The new script was used on currency and some monuments, but never percolated to any great degree to the general Chinese population, even though it was primarily used to write Chinese, rather than Mongolian. The attempt died with the fall of the Yuan dynasty in 1368. After the Manchu conquest of China, the Qing court sponsored transliterations from Chinese into Manchu, but never attempted to promote its script and language for the use of private Chinese individuals (with the exception of some usage on currency) or add knowledge of either to the standard imperial examinations and, by the end of the nineteenth century, had largely transitioned to speaking purely in Chinese. The Qing imperial examinations were on the classics of literary Chinese, a language as foreign to any Sinitic language existing today as classical Latin is to French, and which naturally could not be detached from characters due to the loss of ancient pronunciations. Since neither the Manchu script nor the Manchu language spread widely outside the imperial court, the constituency for changing the Chinese writing system never became large. A dramatically simplified Chinese script was used by an unknown number of women in Hunan Province, but it never spread far due to lack of state support.

The Communist conquest of China did not result in any great reforms such as greatly reducing the number of Chinese characters to more closely match the number of Chinese syllables or promoting the widespread use of romanization in addition to or as a replacement for characters to domestic audiences. Rather, the government merely simplified 6247 characters into 6235 simplified characters in order to make them easier to write. This was surely an idea that would have never been thought of in the computer age; had the Cangjie keyboard been invented just thirty years earlier, it is very unlikely we would have seen mainland character simplification. The invention of the computer led to near-universal use of the alphabet to type Chinese characters, with shape-based methods such as Wubi (a keyboard with 298 components, 23 of them exclusively traditional) and Cangjie (a keyboard with 121 components) generally declining over time due to their insufficiently straightforward rules. Likewise, the invention of the computer has led to an increasing decline in Chinese people’s ability to write the characters, with Chinese ability to write the characters peaking sometime in the late 1990s. Today, though Chinese ability to recognize the characters has never been higher, so has use of the alphabet never been more prevalent. Undoubtedly the trends of the past two decades will continue into the next few.

China is not just seven Brazils

In 2017 (i.e, pre-pandemic), China’s GDP per capita was 88% of Brazil by exchange rates 97% of Brazil by PPP. Given this, it was attractive to view China as just seven Brazils.

However, this would be a mistake. Hong Kong on its own contains a larger population of individuals of >125 IQ than all Brazil. Just seven Hong Kongs would have a population of individuals >125 IQ equivalent to Germany. And China obviously has a lot more than just seven Hong Kongs’ (52 million people!) worth of talent. Shanghai alone, with a population of 24 million, possibly contains more individuals of >125 IQ than Germany. By my estimate, China contains 64 times as many individuals of >125 IQ as does Hong Kong, or twice as many as does the U.S. thus making China possess the largest pool of high-tier talent on Earth:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/402265308770992130/819023913450209300/chinaiq.xlsx

China’s average IQ is probably around 92

The various lists of Chinese IQ by province out there tend to be unreliable. The average IQ of Taiwan, as calculated from the PISA data, is a mere 102.5 or slightly higher; it is silly to expect that of Fujian Province to be any higher than that (the 2018 PISA results for Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang, higher than Singapore, were obviously gamed, though the 2015 ones don’t seem to have been):

Where are all the Level 2 mainland Chinese performers?

Fujian is widely recognized as one of China’s three highest IQ provinces, having been severely overrepresented among imperial examination degree recipients as early as the Song Dynasty, and China is a fairly large and diverse country, so there is no chance at all China’s average IQ is above 100. Since it is best to place one’s estimates on the firmest of grounds, rather than potentially unrepresentative surveys, I have estimated the average IQ of the Chinese provinces by simply assuming a 1-to-1 relationship with provincial GDP per capita, setting the average IQ of Fujian province at 102.5 (the PISA-estimated average IQ of Taiwan), and setting the average IQ of southerly Guangxi province at 82.3 (the PISA-estimated average IQ of Indonesia). This is the most controversial assumption of my model, but there’s no obvious reason to believe it’s wrong. Recall that Guangxi province is, despite excellent infrastructure, actually poorer than Indonesia by PPP, and that the majority of Indonesian ancestry comes from Neolithic China by way of Malaysia (which has a PISA-estimated average IQ of 89.65). The Filipinos also originated from southern China at around the same time, but Guangxi has surely experienced admixture from Hunan and Guangdong since then, which is why I mark Guangxi’s average IQ as the same as that of Indonesia, rather than that of the Philippines.

The model and its results are posted here: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/402265308770992130/817810732573786122/chinaiq.xlsx

So far as I can see, the results check out. Hong Kong’s PISA-estimated average IQ is five points higher than the modeled average for Guangdong province, hardly a severe urban-rural divide. Gansu, the lowest recorded province, has a modeled average IQ of 77.8, almost as low as the Philippines (PISA-estimated average IQ of 77.5) -but, then again, the province is almost as poor as the Philippines by PPP. Shanghai is at 111, slightly higher than Singapore (PISA-estimated average IQ 108.45). The most questionable results are those for the northern provinces, where incomes have obviously been lowered by an overly inefficient state-led economic model -but it is likely using the 2010 GDP per capita data would have placed the average IQ of the northern provinces too high. I doubt Hebei really is as low as 84 or Heilongjiang as low as 78.5.

Overall, the model estimates Chinese average IQ at 91.67, just above that of Serbia (PISA-estimated average IQ 91.35) and higher than those of Chile, Romania, and Malaysia. This estimate is hardly ridiculous – China today is still poorer by PPP than Thailand (PISA-estimated average IQ 86.92), and while there surely is a gap in efficiency between Chinese and Thai capitalism, I doubt it is severe enough to result in China’s average IQ level being similar to that of Western Europe.

Oh; ye of little faith

The sly and neurotic Kentuckian Hong Konger Lyman Stone has recently written a piece arguing that China’s population is destined to fall and converge with that of the imperialist countries and their Pacific puppets. While I do agree with some of this argument -China’s high economic growth isn’t going to last forever, much of its demographic stagnation for the next couple decades is built in, and it is doubtful whether the whole country can economically converge with the typical European First World- it suffers from vastly insufficient faith in the Party’s mechanisms to implement its goals. Never mind the specifics of alliances, which can be debated later, I want to argue against this idea that China, of all countries, is destined toward demographic doom.

Throughout the 2010s, the party has been encumbered with at least three major problems, completely irresolvable by any of the imperialist countries had such problems been faced by them. Consider Xinjiang. In 2009, the province was chaotic and volatile, with hundreds of Chinese being killed by marauding Uyghurs.  Today, in a stunning demonstration of the success of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, the problem is completely solved, Uyghur fertility has been forced to sub-replacement, nonstate violence in Xinjiang  is nonexistent, the population has been almost completely reeducated in the virtues of Xi Jinping Thought and the necessity of assimilation into Chinese society. Could anybody back at the beginning of the decade have predicted that China would solve its Uyghur problem so thoroughly? Hundreds of American and European ghettos remain -and, indeed, today they are expanding with vicious speed with the enthusiastic encouragement of the state; this does not mean that such a thing would be possible in the People’s Republic of China.

The government faced a severe crisis due to the 2019 autonomist protests in Hong Kong, which crippled that city’s status as a major zone of interaction between East and West. Today, Hong Kong is on its way to being a triumphant showpiece of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the Twenty-First Century, with resistance crushed and the city pacified, with all the American State Department’s promotion of the riots and demonstrations gone to waste.

The People’s Republic of China was, as is well known, the first country to experience a major outbreak of the novel coronavirus. Today, it has, unlike all the countries greater than 50 million other than Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, and South Korea (not coincidentally, all neighbors of China), nearly eliminated the virus, while it continues to spread completely unabated through vast swathes of the United States, its foremost imperial rival.

Anybody who did not have faith in the will and means of the party to achieve its goals of preventing chaos, mass death, and disaster in China utterly failed in his predictions in each of the above three events. While there is no guarantee the Chinese state’s will shall not fail in the question of demographics, its growing comfort in the use of authoritarian methods to enforce its social vision certainly seems likely to grow, not shrink, over the coming decade, and there is no reason to believe this comfort will not extend to the question of increasing Han fertility.

The party state’s will and control of the means of force appear firm. Thus, in a country as willing to use state power as China, the future total fertility rate is entirely dependent on the Party’s preferences. If it wants it to be 12, it will be 12. If it wants it to be 4, it will be 4. And if it wants it to be 2, it will definitely be 2. The methods to achieve heightened fertility are straightforward -bans on women from employment if they fail to bear a sufficient number children, strict and large fines on urban couples if they fail to have children after a certain age, strong incentives for young men to marry, a lowering of the age of marriage, promotion of marriage and childbearing in the means of mass information and among the elite. Given the party state’s already excessive inconveniencing of the public with checkpoints at public transportation, there is no reason to believe the party would sacrifice such a vital national goal as increasing fertility for the sake of some trivial public inconvenience about performing such a biologically necessary and ancient task.

Never mind experiencing demographic doom. With such methods as the party state has already very recently tried and used, China could (and likely will) comfortably expand its population while sending tens of millions of friendly emigrants directly to the West to promote its interests there.

Now, certainly, talk is cheap, it is, thus, firmly appropriate here for me to make a concrete prediction. I thus make two. While America’s White population will certainly decline between today and 2040, China’s Han population will rise. And while America’s White total fertility rate will stay consistently below 2 between now and 2040, China’s will rise to above 2.2 by the year 2035.

We’ll see who’s right soon enough. All I know is that when Xi has talked before, he meant business.

China’s coronavirus response was basically Korea-level

We knew very little about the Chinese response to the coronavirus or about its appropriateness as of the first of January. We knew a lot more as of the first of February. Today, after the experience of over ten dozen countries, we know a lot more than we did on the first of February. It consistently reflects well on China relative to all but half a dozen or so countries, most of which border China- Mongolia, Burma, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Slovakia, and consistently reflects poorly on the imperialist countries.

The novel coronavirus was first discovered in the city of Wuhan on December 26 and was first reported to the WHO on December 31. At the time, the government had almost no information to make decisions off of. How fast did it spread? How did it spread? What was the length of spread? For how long had it been spreading? What was the time from infection to symptom onset? Most importantly, was this basically H1N1 flu (a notorious overreported nothingburger which required no action whatsoever) or a highly deadly infection like MERS? None of the answers to these questions were known in late December. They are known now. It is now known the virus results in a large number of asymptomatic cases. It is now known that asymptomatic spread is quite common, except in children. It is now known that spread varies greatly depending on the nature of activities a person engages in, with mass gatherings with close face to face contact like a seafood market being far more likely to result in a large cluster of symptomatic cases than public transportation on which mask-wearing is universal and talking is rare. It is now known that universal mask-wearing is a great aid to helping keep the reproductive number of the virus down. It is also now known that when a significant spike in deaths is noticed in a city, the number of infections there immediately starts declining, not because of herd immunity, but due to rising social distancing due to growing awareness of the new deaths. It is also now known that counts of cases and deaths are notoriously lagging indicators of actual infections. None of this was known to Chinese authorities at the beginning of this year. Considering all this massive and fully excusable ignorance, their missteps make a great deal of sense and their overall response from December to this day appears quite admirable. The city of Wuhan was limited to some four thousand deaths and four hundred thousand infected, the latter number consistent with by seroprevalence tests and basic logic. Wuhan has the same population as Belgium, but, due to China’s much better response, less than half as many coronavirus deaths. Much worse undercounting took place in Italy; every country that experienced a major pandemic undercounted both coronavirus deaths and cases. The situation in the rest of China isn’t really relevant, since China’s government put out all the sparks emanating out of Wuhan (China’s most important transportation center) successfully, more or less as I expected them to at the time. I was correctly worried about Indonesia and India, though I overestimated the reproductive number in the southerly climes and incorrectly worried about Thailand and Malaysia.

It is pretty clear that China’s original response was less proactive than that of most of its neighbors -Thailand, Korea, Burma, Mongolia, Vietnam, Taiwan, etc. The only truly good way to have prepared for this possibility was to have mandated mask-wearing in indoor areas in public every winter. Ideally, once the novel coronavirus was discovered, Chinese authorities would have engaged in a Vietnam-style strategy to contain its still minor outbreak -massive isolation of contacts combined with a quick rampup of testing to discover asymptomatic cases in order to quarantine them and their contacts, as well as shutting down outbound travel from Wuhan. But given the lack of existing knowledge of sustained community transmission with a high reproductive number until mid-January, this is a rather tall order for a country with no pre-existing knowledge about the peculiar features of the virus, and would have been well above typical First World levels of competence. I, for one, consistently favored the somewhat deficient, but still generally functional Korean-style approach from mid-January until April. Such proactive, affirmative, offensive measures to curb the spread of a virus causing just a few pneumonia cases was an approach only such a sublime republic as Mongolia could pull off with no error. Korea didn’t even begin testing all pneumonia cases for the coronavirus until February 18, more than twenty days after the first recorded case in the country. New viruses are discovered every day. It seems Chinese authorities chose not to respond proactively until more information about the virus could be known to confirm it would neither burn itself out nor would be as as much of a nothingburger as H1N1 flu. The high age of those most severely hit by the pneumonia must also have struck the authorities into some degree of complacency. As a result of mistakes committed by the Chinese authorities, Wuhan had as many as a hundred thousand infections by January 15, when overcrowded hospital videos began to become prominent on Chinese social networks. The long lag between infections, symptoms, and deaths combined with the high rate of asymptomatic cases and spread blindsided the authorities. Wuhan eventually had some four thousand deaths (or possibly as much as 2-3x more). Hong Kong, the pro-CCP leadership of which began to be concerned about the new virus as soon as it was reported and the first government in the world to Tweet out concern over it in English, had four deaths. New York City already has over twenty five thousand, and this pandemic isn’t even over. The situation in Wuhan roughly paralleled that in New York City with a difference of two months, with the exception that Wuhan’s infections obviously fell much faster than those in New York City once the Chinese government began taking anti-pandemic measures there. In both cases, infections during the portion of the epidemic during which they were still increasing were clearly undercounted by the authorities because of lack of early mass testing. It is questionable to the extreme that any but half a dozen other countries could have been as effective in countering the virus had its first superspreader event been within their borders. Overall, I am forced to agree with Ren Yi that “On a 10-point scale, I grade the Chinese government a 9 to 9.5.”. Certainly it confirms China has extraordinary levels of state capacity, far superior to those in any of the imperialist countries, and certainly far superior to any of the other BRICS. Of all the great countries exceeding seventy million in population, it’s clear only China, Vietnam, Japan, and, to a lesser extent, Germany and Turkey have any real ability to combat epidemics (we have yet to see about Ethiopia).

The decision to restrict within-country travel was easily the smartest decision Chinese authorities made relative to most of the world. It greatly decreased the number of sparks the various provincial governments had to put out in the majority of the country while the situation in Wuhan was getting under control. Very few other countries prevented outbound travel from their leading pandemic epicenters. Ultimately, however, the Chinese authorities’ delay in restricting internal travel might have been a highly salutary thing. It demonstrated to the entirety of the world that democracy had no impact whatsoever on good governance, that the Chinese system (so far) is largely superior to that of the First World, and that the West’s riches did not result from current “good institutions” so much as a set of past institutions that resulted in the creation of an innovative private sector in much earlier days. Had the Chinese government snuffed out its pandemic without it spreading to the rest of the world, the rest of the world might have thought China’s mistakes during its pandemic were demerits against its system, rather than common problems the rest of the world currently faces. The Chinese lockdown (or stay-at-home order), the portion of the response that most hurt its economy, was, in retrospect, a blunt, dumb, and unnecessary measure, and was seen as so by Western media at the time. But given the sheer number of supposedly competently administered countries that adopted it, it may well have been one of China’s smartest moves, as it demonstrated the imperialist countries were too racist to learn from their own vassals in Korea and Taiwan. Without the mass unemployment caused by the American lockdown, would the Anglo-American riots of May-June 2020 have even happened? Today in America, Britain, and Sweden, ideologues on both the left and right are actively encouraging people to spread the virus and work to obstruct contact tracing. But Biomaoist America and its English and Swedish pals are so much better than Dengist China!

On a related note, Australia has once again proven itself to be by far the most dynamic country in the Anglosphere in general, and, thus, the White world.

The China shock did hurt the American economy, but not in the way most explain

There is a common meme, true but misstated, that the rise of China 2003-2011 reduced the consumption of Americans. Behind it, though never explicitly stated, can only be the idea that newly rich Chinese consumed goods and services that would otherwise have been consumed by Americans.

The much more common statement of the view that the rise of China reduced the consumption of Americans is that the exchange of Chinese manufactured goods for American assets resulting from the U.S. capital account surplus with China transferred wealth from U.S. manufacturing workers and domestic industrial capitalists to U.S. construction workers, governments, and landlords. This is true enough. However, it does not constitute an overall consumption transfer from Chinese to Americans. Rather, it constitutes consumption transfer within the United States, e.g., from Michigan to Florida. Even the increasingly high price of U.S. assets (e.g., housing) resulting from the American capital account surplus with China could not have possibly decreased overall U.S. consumption on net. It would simply have been another within-country consumption transfer, that is, a transfer from domestic asset buyers to domestic asset owners. In a two-country model, anything other than perfectly free trade between the U.S. and China would only make economic sense by making tariff incidence fall on the producer, something only possible given very high importer levels of monopsony power (cf. economists’ optimal tariff theory).

However, the two country model does not apply for the 2003-2011 period. The rise of China did transfer overall consumption from Americans to Chinese, as well as to Russians, Saudis, and Brazilians. This was the case because the rise of China reduced U.S. export prices and increased its import prices.

Imagine three countries, the U.S., China, and Saudi Arabia. There are two commodities, oil and manufactured goods. Both the U.S. and China export manufactured goods and import oil, while Saudi Arabia imports manufactured goods from both and exports oil to both. An increase in Chinese exports increases the price of oil, thus hurting Americans by increasing import prices and helping Saudis by increasing export prices. It also decreases the price of manufactured goods, thus hurting Americans by decreasing U.S. export prices and helping Saudis by decreasing Saudi import prices. This is, more or less, what happened to the U.S. during the 2003-2011 period, though I will not try to quantify the effect here. Between 2003 and 2011, the U.S., Portugal, and Italy all experienced unusually slow economic growth, while Brazil, Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc. and, of course, the engine of this entire movement, China, all experienced unusually fast economic growth. Developing countries in South and Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe also experienced unusually fast economic growth due to greater credit supply during this process (Greece and Spain experienced this before 2009, but not after).

American protectionism against China in the period 2003-2011 would have worked to increase its consumption only insofar as it decreased U.S. import prices and (less plausibly) increased U.S. export prices. For this to be true, it would require a substantial amount of American monopsony power over Chinese manufactured goods, as well as smaller U.S. consumption gains from cheaper domestic prices of manufactured goods than U.S. consumption losses from more expensive imported commodities.

After 2011, the U.S. increasingly began to remedy its heavy reliance on imported oil while U.S.-China trade as a percentage of U.S. GDP stagnated, thus bringing an end to (though obviously not a full reversal of) the China shock. If the U.S. becomes a net commodities exporter, it will definitely economically benefit, on net, from the rise of China, and protectionism would be indisputably economically counterproductive.

On China’s Economic Potential

The best functional equivalent of today’s China isn’t India or the E.U. or the United States. It’s the Roman Empire, were it still around today. Both have ancient origins. Both are fairly diverse both climatically and demographically, but not as diverse as the post-1492 European empires. The Roman Empire region’s population today is half that of China (at the Roman Empire’s height, its population was basically equal to that of China). Like China today, the Roman Empire was a nominal Republic that was in practice a despotism. Both empires were similarly technologically advanced when the Roman Empire was at its height.

This comparison is extremely useful today in understanding where China will end up over the next few decades, first economically and secondly in terms of national power. China’s current per capita GDP is similar to Mexico’s. The best predictor of per capita GDP in a country is its human capital. Both China and the Roman Empire region contain areas of very high and very unimpressive human capital. As a result, we should expect China’s GDP per capita to end up around where Roman Empire’s would be were it a modern-day Mediterranean state.

All evidence shows math is a special strength of the Chinese (especially Southeastern Chinese, e.g., Hakka and Fujianese), but math scores as not a useful predictor of economic development once one already has Verbal/Science scores. Korea and Japan are basically as rich as Britain and France, even though their math scores are obviously superior. Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Guangdong’s 2015 smart fraction for PISA Science was right between Britain and Belgium (verbal scores were relatively worse). The population of B-S-J-G is around 240 million. Half of this would be 120 million -precisely as one would expect if China were comparable to the Roman Empire region and England, France, and the Netherlands were comparable to B-S-J-G. The 2018 numbers released last year were clearly gamed (as the Chinese leadership is wont to do) and are, thus, worthless for analysis. Fujian and Zhejiang are, I presume, comparable in non-math human capital to Switzerland, Northern Italy, and the formerly Roman-occupied parts of Germany.

So where is China’s equivalent of the Muslim Mediterranean? One would expect it to exist. China is, after all, the fairly recent origin of the Filipinos/Maori/Polynesians, as well as of the Thais and Laotians. None of these groups have large smart fractions. And, indeed, though evidence is far from conclusive, there are strong indications that China’s equivalent of the Muslim Mediterranean does exist in the regions of Guangxi, Guizhou, Yunnan, Jiangxi, Anhui, Hebei, and Sichuan. Though the test used in the paper linked to isn’t particularly predictive of national outcomes, and the idea intellectual will and ability in these provinces are actually the lowest in the world seems extremely doubtful, the assumption that the state of human capital in Guizhou and Jiangxi is not much different from that in -and these regions are not richer than- Indonesia and Egypt seems a fairly safe one to make.

Since China for obvious reasons cannot hope to economically surpass the most successful post-Communist countries -Slovenia and Czechia- and since it is already almost at Bulgaria’s (≈Mexico’s) level of GDP per capita, a reasonable observer should conclude China will probably stop its above-trend growth with its current institutions at a level of GDP per capita somewhere in between these -say at around that of Croatia, Latvia, or even Hungary. Given China’s not as impressive as advertised human capital state, this indicates a rather positive assessment of current Chinese Communist economic institutions- that they are at least as good as those that can be expected from the post-Communist European Union. Further institutional reform (since all agree China’s economic institutions are far from ideal -an identical Chinese worker will never earn as much in real terms in a comparable part of China as in Taiwan, and especially not under current Chinese Communist economic institutions) would thus surely guarantee China’s economy being at least as large as the U.S. by exchange rates, and more than twice the size of the U.S. by PPP.

Definitions of Factor Intensity

Land: Anything not of human origin and not capital.
Land-intensive: Requiring much land per worker or per unit of capital.
Example: Primary industry in Argentina, 18th century.
Labor-intensive: Requiring much labor per unit of land or capital.
Example: Agriculture in China and Japan, 18th century.
Example: Manufacturing in Belarus, Mauritius, Ukraine, and Malaysia is believed to be this.
Capital: Anything not directly consumed, but increasing the productive abilities of labor and land.
Capital-intensive: Requiring much capital per unit of labor.
Example: U.S. manufacturing, c. 2008.
Capital: Accumulated unconsumed portion of expenditure minus depreciation.
Capital-intensive: Requiring much capital per unit of labor or TFP.
Example: Manufacturing in North Korea and Russia, c. 1980.
TFP: Anything that isn’t differences in employment as a percentage of the population and differences in accumulated unconsumed portion of expenditure minus depreciation. It could be land, for all anyone cares. It’s not counted as unconsumed portion of expenditure, right?

To encourage clear thinking.

Development Successes; Development Failures

I recently wondered, after seeing Brazil and South Korea’s striking real GDP per capita divergence, which underdeveloped economies over the past forty years most succeeded and which most failed at growing their real GDP per capita. As Scott Sumner has pointed out, many countries (including, to some extent, the U.S.) experienced a permanent decline in real per capita GDP growth around the year 1973, though some countries (e.g., in Latin America) had high growth rates until the early 1980s Volcker Shock. North Korea, the Soviet Union, Singapore, South Africa, Japan, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Canada, and other nations that had managed to make great strides between 1900 and 1973 had dramatic growth slowdowns following that year, with Spain and Portugal having a decade of stagnation between 1974 and 1984 and Greece two such decades (1974-1994!). Italy, a country with lower living standards than China in 1900 and which had surpassed the U.K. in real GDP per capita (PPP) terms by 1976, had a growth slowdown around 1993 and another one around 2003. Japan had a very famous (and seemingly permanent) growth slowdown in 1991. Japan, France and Italy had all finished their phase of catch-up growth with the U.S. by 1973 (Germany had done so by 1961).

The below are the answers to the question mentioned in the first sentence of this post. All real GDP per capita numbers are from the World Bank. They can be verified by looking at Google Public Data.
Development Successes:

Former Soviet States:

Estonia (astonishing growth from 1994 to today) and the other Baltics

Belarus (astonishing growth from 1995 to 2011, especially compared with Ukraine, but economy has stagnated for the last two years)

Armenia and Georgia (grew at almost exactly the pace and level of China until 2009, but fell behind China as these countries had a recession in 2009, while China didn’t)

East Asian Successes:

China (so far; 21X increase in GDP per capita in 40 years counts as a success in any book, even if the economy stagnates for a century after)

The Four Asian Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong) and Macau

Slower-Growing East Asian Economies (successful for any other region, but not when compared to other Asian countries):

Vietnam (Grew 4X since reforms. Overly affected by China and seems like a complete failure compared to it).

Malaysia (GDP per capita 4.2X that of 1973).

Indonesia (GDP per capita 4.6X that of 1973. Seems like a failure compared to China).

Thailand (GDP per capita 5.3X that of 1973).

Latin American and Caribbean Successes:

Chile (2013 GDP per capita is 3.3X that at time of Pinochet’s coup).

Dominican Republic (2013 GDP per capita is 2.93X that in 1973).

St. Vincent and the Grenadines (2013 GDP per capita is 3.18X that in 1973).

Belize (2013 GDP per capita 2.96X that in 1973, but has stagnated for nearly a decade).

African Outliers:

Cabo Verde (2013 GDP per capita is 5.5X that in 1980)

Seychelles (2013 GDP per capita is 3.06X that in 1973).

Botswana (2013 GDP per capita is 6X that in 1973).

Lesotho (2013 GDP per capita is 2.93X that in 1973).

South Asian Successes:

Bhutan (miraculous growth since 1980 [GDP per capita 6.2X in 2013 compared with that of 1980] with no strong foundation of economic freedom, but, by all accounts, the best court system in South Asia).

India (2013 GDP per capita is 4.37X that in 1973).

Sri Lanka (2013 GDP per capita 4.66X that in 1973).

Mauritius (2013 GDP per capita 3.48X that in 1976).

Middle Eastern Successes:

Egypt (2013 GDP per capita 3.71X that in 1973).

Malta (2013 GDP per capita 3.68X that in 1973).

Celtic Tiger:

Ireland (2013 GDP per capita over 3.5X that in 1973).

Development Failures:

Asian Failures:

Philippines (Fell into a dump between 1982 and 2003. Very instructive East Asian failure, if only for showing East Asian economies can fail in an age of microchips.)

Papua New Guinea (18% GDP per capita growth in 40 years.)

Burma and North Korea (for obvious reasons)

Latin American Disasters:

Brazil (a country that pretended to be China between 1968 and 1980; 38% GDP per capita growth between 1980 and 2013)

Mexico (a country that hasn’t lost its track record of failure since 1980; GDP per capita in 2013 20% higher than that in 1980).

Nicaragua (1976 was the best year it’s ever had).

Suriname (yes, not Latin American, but still a failure from independence to the Year 2000)

Venezuela (the classic Latin American basket case; GDP per capita today lower than that in 1964).

Argentina (moving roughly sideways since at least 1960; GDP per capita in 2006 65% higher than that in 1960, but this may be due to understated inflation).

Haiti (same place it was in the 1950s).

Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras (all in the same boat-failures growing at 0-2.5% per year)

African Countries:

South Africa (fell behind Brazil in growth terms after 1974)

Madagascar (steady decline; GDP per capita is 55% of what it was in 1960)

Senegal (GDP per capita remarkably steady; no change since 1960)

Togo (economic miracle until 1969; no lasting change in GDP per capita after that even unto this day).

Malawi (economic miracle between 1960 and 1979; no lasting change in GDP per capita after that even unto this day)

Comoros (GDP per capita is 20% lower than peak in 1984).

Guinea (amazingly flat)

Kenya (strong growth until 1972, stagnation for three decades, return to less impressive growth)

Niger (fantastic decline from 1966 onward followed by stagnation)

Gambia (stagnation since 1978)

Belgian Congo (it was 2.6X better off in real GDP per capita terms under Belgium).

Djibouti (country still not up to its 1990 level of real GDP per capita).

Burundi (5% growth per 53-year period)

Ivory Coast (strong growth until 1978; then, collapse until 2011)

Now, ask yourself: what was different between the failures and successes? Both some of the Latin American failures and the Asian tigers had industrial policies. Mexico has more economic freedom than China, but the labor force in Mexico is prematurely shifting away from the productive sectors (manufacturing and agriculture) and into the famously unproductive traditional economy and services, while China has successfully continued its rapid growth. What prevented the Comoros from growing like Taiwan, Singapore, or Egypt? Why is Belarus, well known for its red tape and financial repression, one of the development successes?