Here’s the follow-up thread: Karloff’s Gymnasium, the economic logic behind China’s rise. No monopoly rents. No offshore pillaging. No sermon. Just capacity and scale. Built to match the civilizational framing you laid out.
ideas.repec.org/p/hku/wpaper/2…
Western power is built on rent extraction. Colonial trade routes, oil-dollar regimes, pharma patents, financial instruments. The game is to sit on choke points and charge fees. (1/12)
China rejected that model. Its rise is industrial, not financial. It builds productive forces. It doesn’t skim surplus from the global South through hedge funds or sanctions. (2/12)
Karloff’s Gymnasium calls China a civilizational anomaly in the capitalist world-system. Not a successor to Western imperialism, but a rupture from it. (3/12)
It doesn’t project power through belief. It doesn’t need you to become Chinese. It doesn’t repackage its rise in human rights gloss. It just makes things and sells them. (4/12)
The Belt and Road isn’t a missionary network. It’s a logistics grid. It links ports, rails, and energy for trade, not ideology. It’s industrial diplomacy, not evangelism. (5/12)
This terrifies Western strategists. Not because it’s evil. But because it works. No moral theater. No Wall Street dependence. Just scale, speed, and self-directed development. (6/12)
China’s economic model is grounded in surplus reinvestment. Infrastructure, upstream control, tech localization. No reliance on military keyholes or IP monopoly rents. (7/12)
This is what Karloff’s Gymnasium dissects. A system where power is built through capacity, not coercion. Through labor, not leverage. Through steel, not sermons. (8/12)
Western media calls it state capitalism. That’s just name-calling. What they really mean is: it doesn't obey the logic of hedge funds and Harvard grads. (9/12)
In the Western model, the core extracts from the periphery. In the Chinese model, the periphery gets railways, dams, and jobs. That's why the narrative war is so desperate. (10/12)
China doesn’t preach revolution. It builds it through high-speed rail, EV batteries, 5G towers, and steel foundries. It’s not abstract. It’s physical. (11/12)
Karloff’s Gymnasium isn’t a metaphor. It’s the weight room where Western ideology breaks.
China doesn’t rent the future.
It builds it. (12/12)
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