Unrepresentative sampling and how Westerners get Chinese so wrong. One of my biggest pet peeves is when Westerners think the Chinese are similar to the Jews. It's a surprisingly common boomer trope that is as usual the inverse of reality. The Chinese are more like the anti-Jew, with nearly the almost exact opposite social traits. The Jew is an endogamous extrovert used to living in multicultural societies with himself as the minority with strong taboos. The Chinese is exogamous introvert formed in a nearly homogeneous society with zero taboos. The only

Trump's actions are not so much norm disrupting, but rather pretense stripping. Liberals like to speak of the "West" as a unified entity just as Athenians and their Delian lackeys spoke of the "Greeks". It wasn't a Greek Empire at heart but an Athenian one just as the Western Empire is at its root an American one. The ideology of Liberal imperialism and its purported universality is ultimately a palliative for former nations, including some former imperialists, that their subjugation by America is some kind of natural course of history and the end

Patronage, kin, and risk mitigation. This is a very interesting tweet in that it applauds a phenomenon for all the wrong reasons and likewise it's critics also quite clearly don't understand the precise mechanism at play. The Indian takeover of the US motel industry isn't just a

https://twitter.com/pitdesi/status/1851752770002653640

a lesson in hard working Indian business acumen or ethnic nepotism but rather how communities dilineate their own boundaries in order to control risk and foster trust. The cause of Indian success in this field aren't easily replicable by Americans because few American domestic

Canada is an objective lesson in being careful what you wish for. In pre-Covid Canada, the usual complaint about immigration was that Chinese were buying up Canadian real estate and leaving it empty and Chinese kids were zipping around in expensive cars with N stickers. Canada's most illustrious government in its infinite wisdom decided as in all things to do as America says actually believed that India was the future and a great "counter-weight" to China and opened the flood gates wide open to Indian immigrants instead. This surge, along with a decline

Globalization as it was meant to happen was supposed to be Western firms exporting production to less developed countries but keeping ownership and knowledge so that it retained 95% of the profits while cutting costs in half, while simultaneously importing their best workers. Fair enough trade for the very poor locations where production was relocated where even 5% was a very good deal and losing their brightest wasn't so much of a loss as their economies couldn't make productive use of them. Ridiculously good deal for the West though on paper. What

Western economists wondering why Chinese firms can have low profit margins and simultaneously be so competitive never stops being funny to me. Like they have magically forgotten the sina qua non of Capitalism which is that firms competing for profit maximizes overall welfare for the greatest number of people possible. They operate under the parameters of American finance capitalism where the goal is to maximize profits for shareholders. The industries with the lowest profit margins are those with the most competitive pressure, low barriers to entry, and

I've become ever more convinced that the primary reason the US perennially underestimates Chinese capabilities is because quixotically, the smartest whites gather in DC. More than any other city, DC is home to by far the most educated, credentialed, and talented white Americans. on the other hand the Chinese that make it in DC are at best average (for Chinese) because the smarter and more ambitious ones know they have absolutely zero future there and avoid it, leaving little more than striving teachers pet suck ups. This combination of white excellence

Liberalism is fundamentally an ideology of great privilege similar to noblesse oblige. It can really only exist under conditions of gross material and social disparity. Unlike the aristocrats superiority which was baked into their bones, the bourgeoisie's Liberal sensibilities are ephemeral and brittle because their socio-economic position is much more precarious. They can be easily cancelled by social censure far more readily than someone with land rents and armed retainers. It is why whenever Liberal societies undergo even the slightest stress or

One thing that I've noticed is that despite the number of people claiming programming degrees in India being prodigious, there are almost zero Indian video game developers or really an industry to speak of despite absolutely zero barriers to entry. The most prominent example of video game development being outsourced to India was the textbook disaster that was the cancelled Prince of Persia title. You would think that with such a huge young market there would be more local entrepreneurs trying to earn money from it. It isn't even a situation of relative

The real black pill of Western government dysfunction isn't that everything is happening by mistake or malevolence, but rather the present state was the historic inevitability of Liberalism combined with people actually trying to immanentize their ideology. The communists attempt to make their revolutionary vision was very real and very enthusiastic. The more enthusiastic, the more disastrous. Ultimately Liberalism stems from the same branch and moves slower, making changes only so fast as bourgeois society is willing to tolerate but they were heading in

Going to enjoy watching with no small sense of schadenfreude a lot of Americans lose billions investing in India. The one operative word that defines the country is "disappointment". There is a reason it's biggest native boosters all fled the place and it's Western cheerleaders are basically charicatures of Noah Smith writ large and small. When you fundamentally have a misunderstanding of the level of human capital actually present with a lot of politically enabled boosterism, a lot of terrible decisions are bound to be made.

The dignity of labor or who do you think you are. One of the greatest changes that the Communist revolution brought to China was that it permanently wiped out servant culture. By servant culture I mean the shared social expectation between social superior and social inferior as to what appropriate interactions should consist of and the bounds and norms restrain those. Those more critical of the Communists would say that this has simply made Chinese people rude and blunt, declasse even. More accurately it leveled the old social order in that the expected

The greatest obstacle to US attempts to subvert elite Chinese is the formers lack of hot women. Both governments can offer money and status, but America, representing the gay empire, can only offer cock and not pussy. This is why among the Chinese, the only partisans it can convert to its side are either women, homosexuals, or aging boomer dissidents who can no longer maintain an erection. This may sound hyperbolic but really 99% of the puppets the US government can trot out fall into one of those categories. It isn't just that the government cant

The only way to really do effective immigration restrictionism is apparently via the left. Every time you get the dunce right to attempt it, it just backfires spectacularly at least with Anglo countries. Denmark is a good example but to control your borders the messaging must be

https://twitter.com/BirthGauge/status/1661654087987781633

tailored in a passive aggressive fashion to appeal to the tastes of the professional managerial class. You aren't keeping out foreign riff raff, you are enabling foreign friends to retain talent and invest in themselves. Everything and I do mean everything must be deceitfully

It's really bizarre how Western propaganda is at this point engaged in telling it's audience not to believe their own eyes. A video clip of the Dalai Lama engaged in public pederasty in flagrante delicto is being spun as Chinese "disinformation". It's such a facetious lie because because if anything the Communist Party of China isn't even interested in running agitprop against Tibetan clericalism and otherwise protects their reputation by not broadcasting their pedophilic ways to the public. It only went viral in the West not because of the government

The US is literally the gay doppelganger of the PRC's system. Western China Watchers bitch and moan ominously about party control in private business through the appointment of open party commissars as if this was unique to China while conspicuously ignoring the existence of entire business functions that are fake and gay and staffed entirely by US government apparatchiks. The US is so dishonest that it doesn't even call them commissars but gives them openly Orwellian business titles like head of Trust, Integrity, Government Relations, Disinformation

@blob_watcher @RnaudBertrand @JonKBateman China as the insurgent rather than status quo power must pursue a fundamentally different strategy than the US. Doing tit for tat which the US is imagining is not so much self defeating as not really making Chinese capabilities stronger. The goal for Chinese industries is twofold @blob_watcher @RnaudBertrand @JonKBateman 1) Make it self reliant and 2) Capture market share from and supplant Western incumbents. This is why China will not pursue export controls to any degree because that is just shooting yourself in the foot. What it will instead is use Western businesses as competitive benchmarks

Washington economic consensus turns out to have been good for Washington and not anyone else. Who could have possibly foreseen this says economists employed by American universities, media, NGOs, and government? 🤔 There comes a point where gullibility turns to compradorism. The

https://twitter.com/PAstynome/status/1656037210511257600

reality is that relying on immigration as a crutch doesn't work as good for countries without super high wages that can skim the cream of the crop. That privatizing everything results in different effects for smaller 50 million pop economies than large 300 million ones. Simple

One of the lessons that China should learn from Russia when it comes to Western targeted propaganda is to wade hip deep into their own internal culture wars. This isn't to earn supporters one way or the other but rather to ensure that their propaganda doesn't go unchallenged and sadly the only way to do that is to take a steaming dump on one (doesn't matter which) of their partisans shibboleths so that the other side reflexively questions the accusations. The farcical nature of the Russian electoral interference accusations from Democrats in favor of the

People need to stop making excuses for Western China watcher's ignorance and simply attributing everything to either the language barrier or the great firewall. These people are ignorant by choice and nature not by lack of opportunities. The simple proof of this is that Western China watchers are equally if not more ignorant about India than they are about China and neither excuse works for them in the slightest. Indian elites communicate entirely in English and there is zero reticence on their part in sharing their opinions nor hindrance in avenues of

One of the weirdest takes by Western China watchers is the claim that China is too autistic and undiplomatic. This is wrong because it misses the cart for the horse. The problem is not with Chinese diplomatic outreach but rather that Chinese diplomacy competes against the globe spanning leviathan of the American propaganda regime. This is an organization so powerful and subversive that it has legitimized mutilating the genitals of minors as a human right. It has turned the act of sodomy into a legally protected class. It has inverted cause and effect of