budaatum:


But this is precisely why China is doing so well. They don't stupidly spend the resource they have preparing for war I don't think, or they'd be poor like North Korea.

That's not to say they don't spend any, mind, but I think just enough to stop being attacked. And I think they know the weapons of the next war would be economical bullets and not the armaments the west are piling up.

I strongly believe that China's GDP in absolute terms has overtaken the US.

The evidence speaks for itself. For decades, China has deliberately kept its currency devalued, to make its exports cheaper. If China lets its currency float to its true market value, then overnight, it will become the world's largest economy. Now it's second in GDP, but first in PPP.

Also, China's economic makeup is something real, such as production and manufacturing, while the US is virtual, mostly in finance, the service sector, and Wall Street.

You also have to look at the simple fact that China has over 1.4B people, while the US has over 300M, but there are almost no homeless or hungry people in China, meanwhile, in the US, millions are homeless, and even more millions are just one paycheck away from being homeless.

The US has no free healthcare, or free education, and divided citizens who classify themselves by race, color, job title, and zipcode. Meanwhile, China united all its ethnic groups to make them a stronger whole.

China has the largest reserve in the world, standing at 3.22T USD, that's money they don't even know what to do with it, and mostly invest it through their BRI project.

When I study China's strategy, I can't help but point every one of their moves to the legendary book titled ''the Art of War. The Chinese planned their destiny well and won without firing a single bullet.

And if you want to fight them, they will beat you to a stupor. They are that silent kid in the block, that you shouldn't mess with. The real abroad right now is no longer the West, the 21st century belongs to Asia.

pansophist:


I strongly believe that China's GDP in absolute terms has overtaken the US.

The evidence speaks for itself. For decades, China has deliberately kept its currency devalued, to make its exports cheaper. If China lets its currency float to its true market value, then overnight, it will become the world's largest economy. Now it's second in GDP, but first in PPP.

Also, China's economic makeup is something real, such as production and manufacturing, while the US is virtual, mostly in finance, the service sector, and Wall Street.

You also have to look at the simple fact that China has over 1.4B people, while the US has over 300M, [b] but there are almost no homeless or hungry people in China, meanwhile, in the US, millions are homeless, and even more millions are just one paycheck away from being homeless [b].

The US has no free healthcare, or free education, and divided citizens who classify themselves by race, color, job title, and zipcode. Meanwhile, China united all its ethnic groups to make them a stronger whole.

China has the largest reserve in the world, standing at 3.22T USD, that's money they don't even know what to do with it, and mostly invest it through their BRI project.

When I study China's strategy, I can't help but point every one of their moves to the legendary book titled ''the Art of War. The Chinese planned their destiny well and won without firing a single bullet.

And if you want to fight them, they will beat you to a stupor. They are that silent kid in the block, that you shouldn't mess with. The real abroad right now is no longer the West, the 21st century belongs to Asia.

What you wrote is also obtainable in China.

Why I agree with that China has made significant progress, they haven't overtake the United States as of today.

The last frontier is semiconductor and advanced military tech which US still controls. When Trump wins in November, the full US leverage will be used for America people, "America First" policy.

China think they can ban Amazon, Facebook and other Western tech companies but US will allow tik tok ba? The orange man is coming with full scale trade war and "drill baby, drill" for oil

[quote author=pansophist post=129223881][/quote]

American problem is that corruption lies with the industrial military complex. That's why they are fighting the orange man with every arsenal they got.

"I will settle Russian-Ukraine war in 24hrs. I know what to say to each sides (Putin and Zelensky)" - Orange man

Do you think the industrial military complex is happy with this statement? Do you think they are happy that no war happened during Trump's time?

lastkingsman:


What you wrote is also obtainable in China.

Why I agree with that China has made significant progress, they haven't overtake the United States as of today.

The last frontier is semiconductor and advanced military tech which US still controls. When Trump wins in November, the full US leverage will be used for America people, "America First" policy.

China think they can ban Amazon, Facebook and other Western tech companies but US will allow tik tok ba? The orange man is coming with full scale trade war and "drill baby, drill" for oil

China leads the US in 37 out of the 44 critical technologies that will dominate the 21st century

https://www.businessinsider.com/china-leads-us-critical-emerging-technologies-strategic-competition-research-report-2023-3

China actually didn't ban those company you mentioned, they are just too smart fo these companies and understood what these companies stands for. I will explain.

These companies either voluntarily left China, or refuse to set up business because of Chinese tech laws, which states that the data of Chinese citizens must be stored in data centers located in China, and that the Chinese authorities will have an unrestricted and unconditional access to it.

Because these companies engages in nefarious activities and are accessories for western government, they refuse such conditions, and for that reasons, didn't open in China. The case of facebook is different though.

Facebook was banned because they refuse to give the Chinese government information concerning the activities of the Xinxiang terrorist during the 2009 urumqi riot, which killed lots of people.

Facebook cited user privacy, freedom of speech and those nonsense as a reason why they wont disclose the requested information, then the Chinese government banned them. Please don't just rely on western news that dominate the world for information, do research yourself.

About semi-conductor, it is only a matter of time before China catches up. The west refused to give China access to space, then they created their own space station. They refuse China access to GPS, they created theirs, which is even more accurate than western ones.

CHina has the money, the motivation, the engineers, patriotic citizens, and technocrats that will make it happen. Taiwan is just a stone throw and their brothers, and they will be lured with money. China caught up so fast just within the last four decades, I give semiconductor just a decade more.

"In the 1980s, as China launched its pivotal economic reforms, eight out of every 10 Beijingers used bicycles as their primary mode of transport and the capital city had some of the world’s best bike lanes. Beijing was known as the “bicycle kingdom”. Bikes along with pedestrians flowed together through intersections like a fish moving through water. Today, less than two out of 10 Beijing residents own a bike".

https://www.lotustours.net/Newsletter/2013/May/Beijing.shtml

The threat of China’s electric vehicles

Robinson Meyer Contributing Writer ROBINSON MEYER is the founding executive editor of Heatmap, a media company focused on climate change. · Feb 29, 2024

BYD alone is building new factories in Brazil, Thailand, Hungary and Uzbekistan. America’s Big Three should be worried.

It happened very quickly, so fast that you might not have noticed it. Over the past few months, America’s Big Three automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, the oddly named company that owns Dodge, Chrysler and Jeep — landed in big trouble.

I realize this may sound silly. Ford, General Motors and Stellantis made billions in profit last year, even after a lengthy strike by autoworkers, and all three companies are forecasting a big 2024. But recently, the Big Three found themselves outmaneuvered and missing their goals for electric vehicle sales at the same time that a crop of new affordable, electrified foreign cars appeared, ready to flood the global market.

About a decade ago, America bailed out the Big Three and swore it wouldn’t do it again. But the federal government is going to have to help the Big Three — and the rest of the U.S. car market — again very soon. And it has to do it in the right way — now — to avoid the next auto bailout.

The biggest threat to the Big Three comes from a new crop of Chinese automakers, especially BYD, which specialize in producing plug-in hybrid and fully electric vehicles. BYD’s growth is astounding: It sold three million electrified vehicles last year, more than any other company, and it now has enough production capacity in China to manufacture four million cars a year. But that isn’t enough: It’s building new factories in Brazil, Thailand, Hungary and Uzbekistan, which will produce even more cars, and it may soon add Indonesia and Mexico to that list. A deluge of electric vehicles is coming.

BYD’s cars deliver great value at prices that beat anything coming out of the West. Earlier this month, BYD unveiled a plug-in hybrid that gets decent all-electric range and will retail for just over $11,000. How can it do that? Like other Chinese manufacturers, BYD benefits from its home country’s lower labor costs, but this explains only some of its success. The fact is that BYD — and Chinese automakers like Geely, which owns Volvo Cars and Polestar brands — are very good at making cars. They have leveraged China’s dominance of the battery industry and automated production lines to create a juggernaut.

The Chinese automakers, especially BYD, represent something new in the world. They signal that China’s decadeslong accretion of economic complexity is almost complete: Whereas the country once made toys and clothes and then made electronics and batteries, now it makes cars and airplanes. What’s more, BYD and other Chinese automakers are becoming virtually global car companies, capable of manufacturing electric cars that can compete directly with gas-burning cars on cost.

That is, on the surface, a good thing. Electric cars need to get cheaper and more abundant if we are to have any hope of meeting our global climate goals. But it poses some immediate and thorny problems for American policymakers. After BYD announced its $11,000 plug-in hybrid, it posted on the Chinese social media platform Weibo that “the price will make petrol car assemblers tremble.” The problem is many of those gasoline carmakers are American.

Ford and GM plotted an ambitious E.V. transition three years ago. But it didn’t take long for them to stumble. Last year, Ford lost more than $64,000 on every E.V. that it sold. Since October, it has delayed the opening of one of its new E.V. battery plants, and GM has fumbled the start of its new Ultium battery platform, which is meant to be the foundation for all of its future electric vehicles. Ford and GM have notched some wins here (the Mustang Mach-E and Chevrolet Bolt are modest hits), but they aren’t competing at the level of Tesla and Hyundai — companies that operate factories in less union-friendly states in the Sun Belt.

Jim Farley, Ford’s chief executive, recently disclosed that the company had a secret development team building a cheap, affordable electric car to compete with Tesla and BYD. But producing electric vehicles profitably is an organizational skill, and like any skill, it takes time, effort and money to develop. Even if Ford and GM now bust out innovative new designs, they will lag their competition at executing them well.

The other looming problem for Ford and General Motors is that their balance sheets, while superficially robust, conceal a structural vulnerability. While the two companies have done generally well in recent years, their billions in profits have overwhelmingly flowed from selling a relatively small number of vehicles to a small group of people. Specifically, Ford and GM’s earnings rest primarily on selling pickup trucks, S.U.V.s and crossovers to affluent North Americans.
In other words, if Americans’ appetite for trucks and S.U.V.s falters, then Ford and GM will be in real trouble. That creates a strategic quandary for them. In the coming years, these companies must cross a bridge from one business model to another: They must use their robust truck and S.U.V. earnings to subsidize their growing electric vehicle business and learn how to make E.V.s profitably. If they can make it across this bridge quickly, they will survive. But if their S.U.V. profits crumble before their E.V. business is ready, they will fall into the chasm and perish.

That’s why the flood of cheap Chinese electric vehicles poses such a big problem: It could wash away Ford and GM’s bridge before they have finished building it. Even a wave of competitive electric cars from the Sun Belt automakers — like Kia’s EV9, a three-row S.U.V. — could eat away at their S.U.V. profits before they’re ready.

Perhaps the Big Three deserve destruction; after all, they hooked us on S.U.V.s in the first place and then fell behind in the E.V. race. But letting them die is not a tenable political option for the Biden administration. One goal of Mr. Biden’s presidency is to show not only that decarbonization can work for the American economy but also that it can revive moribund fossil-fuel-dependent communities in the Rust Belt. Mr. Biden has also fought for and won the endorsement of the United Auto Workers, which just cemented a generous new contract with the Big Three and now needs them to thrive.

He has reason, in other words, to help the Big Three even before you get to the harsh electoral realities: The legacy auto industry employs more people in Michigan than any other state, and Mr. Biden’s path to re-election all but requires him to win Michigan in November. (Recall that Donald Trump won Michigan by just under 11,000 votes in 2016.) Mr. Biden cannot allow the possibility of another China shock to hit the Midwest’s auto economy. So what should he do?

The good news is that Congress has already done some of the work for him. You may have heard about the Inflation Reduction Act’s generous subsidies for domestic electric car production. Can it help? It can, and it will, but the act alone is not nearly big enough to insulate these companies from the threat posed by Chinese E.V.s. The Chinese automaker Geely is preparing to sell the small, all-electric Volvo EX30 S.U.V. in the United States for $35,000. That price — which seemingly includes the cost of a 25 percent tariff, first imposed by the Trump administration — rivals what American automakers are capable of doing today, even with the Inflation Reduction Act’s subsidies.
Subsidies likely won’t be enough; Mr. Biden will need to impose new trade restrictions. But here’s where it gets messy. The case for protecting the American auto market from Chinese E.V.s is obvious and politically essential but also highly troublesome. In the short term, American automakers — even the homegrown electric-only carmakers like Tesla and Rivian — must be shielded from a wave of cheap cars. But in the long term, Mr. Biden must be careful not to cordon off the American car market from the rest of the world, turning the United States into an automotive backwater of bloated, expensive, gas-guzzling vehicles. The Chinese carmakers are the first real competition that the global car industry has faced in decades, and American companies must be exposed to some of that threat, for their own good. That means they must feel the chill of death on their necks and be forced to rise and face this challenge.

This could be done in a number of ways. One is by suggesting to American companies that any import restrictions imposed on Chinese cars in the next few years won’t necessarily be permanent. That might encourage American companies to learn everything they can from their new Chinese competition, getting over their hubris and recognizing that Chinese companies now understand aspects of E.V. manufacturing better than their American counterparts. That means that Republican lawmakers, in particular, must recognize that climate-friendly technologies are the future of global industry. Mr. Trump is threatening that, if elected, he would gut the Inflation Reduction Act, even though it’s full of policies meant to help America compete with Chinese E.V.s. There would be no faster way to destroy the U.S. car industry as a global force.
What the United States is trying to do is really hard. We want to preserve the economic geography and institutions of our old fossil-powered economy while retooling it to work in a new zero-carbon world. There’s no small amount of irony in the fact that all those involved in America — Democrats, Republicans, major automakers — resent China for achieving what was once a goal of, well, hippies and environmentalists: making electric cars popular and cheap. But if they’ve done it, America can do it too. It will take grit and good-faith effort. Americans should assume that Ford and General Motors will be competing with BYD and Geely for decades to come, and we should relish that fight.

Gugu for source.

Pansophist,

A question that has been of interest is me is what would the West do as she loses her hegemony? How or would what Western treat or do to non-Western and its allies' citizens residing in Western countries? I am curious. Anyone can chip in as well.

That said, Niger forced the US to vacate the military base tells me the West is gradually leaving or have left the Sahel region. I offer hats to Nigerien elites. Never thought it would happen.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/us/politics/us-niger-military-withdrawal.html

Gerrard59:
Pansophist,

A question that has been of interest is me is what would the West do as she loses her hegemony? How or would what Western treat or do to non-Western and its allies' citizens residing in Western countries? I am curious. Anyone can chip in as well.

That said, Niger forced the US to vacate the military base tells me the West is gradually leaving or have left the Sahel region. I offer hats to Nigerian elites. Never thought it would happen.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/us/politics/us-niger-military-withdrawal.html

Honestly, I don't know.

This is the first time a hegemon has appeared on the world stage with reach to every corner of the globe. In the past, hegemons were specific, eg the Portuguese in navigation, the Spanish dominance in European battlefields, discoveries of the New World, etc.

The American method is one of a kind, which dominates not just one area, but almost, if not all areas, from military to finance, to biomedicine, international trade, sea, nearly everything.

But if I would predict anything, then it would be to implode from the inside, because it is impossible to defeat the US from the outside. If the dollar loses its reserve status, their allies (aka vassals) start feeling the pains of blinding following Washington, therefore, alienating themselves from the hegemon, then it would just crumble on its own.

The turning point would be the disbanding of the UN. Before the UN, the preceding intergovernmental organization was the ''League of Nations'', it lost legitimacy and disbanded because it is impartial by its very existence, just as the UN has become.

With the global south uniting, with a common anger for the unfairness of the global order, the restructuring of a body that would replace the UN will not have the defects the UN has, such as veto powers, and being under the control of a single country or bloc.

budaatum:


https://theconversation.com/electric-cars-pile-up-at-european-ports-as-chinese-firms-struggle-to-find-buyers-228473

I read the conversation on the Financial Times. In summary, the Chinese carmakers have an issue with the company handling logistics and also, Telsa had signed a deal ensuring truck drivers only work with it (Tesla). So, gridlock till they solve the problem. The percentage of Chinese EVs being sold in Europe, although slowly growing, isn't that high sef. Western media just like blowing things out of proportion.