China does seem to have a remarkable ability to copy bad ideas from the West and ruthlessly crush the good ones.
The one child policy was a terrible idea that was very popular among the western left when China adopted it. They held onto for far too long. As a result, China is very likely to get old before it gets rich, with tragic consequences.
When they go against the grain of what the west is doing, it is a good sign they are making a mistake. Covid lock-downs, for instance. They were proud of them and greatly enjoyed lecturing us about our own mistakes in being insufficiently strict.
By the way, on milk. A huge part of China's dairy industry was started with Canadian development aid in the 80s. I toured many a rural Chinese dairy operation back in the day. It was a straight up grant which, had it instead been equity, would have been 100x in returns. However, our aid folks were deaf to the idea of an equity investment, even though the Chinese partners would totally have agreed (the financial structure it would have created would have given the Chinese insiders lots of ways to get rich and out of the country, ways they likely figured out anyway).
Great piece, although I wonder how much of this is really in the West's control. People respect things that are more powerful than them, but the dominant narrative from China for the past few decades has been that the West (America particularly) is in decline. Why would they keep trying to ape the habits of a declining power? A lot of what they're currently doing is probably institutional inertia.
The milk in China, as in similar countries like Japan and South Korea, tends to have reduced lactose. If you've been to these countries and tried the typical grocery store milk there, you'd know this because the milk tastes a bit different. South Korea and Japan did have successful postwar campaigns to increase milk consumption among schoolchildren and younger adults, and nutrition and height increased as a result. Milk, besides being calorically dense, is loaded with IGF-1, insulin like growth factor, which promotes tissue growth. Promoting milk is exactly the sort of intervention an intelligent bureaucrat would believe, especially since it's been tried and tested in similar countries like Japan and South Korea.
As for EV overcapacity and the Belt & Road, they're driven largely by political and security concerns, rather than by some calculus to maximize returns to capital, so criticizing them on the grounds that they waste capital and limit returns doesn't make sense.
And the fertility issue is a case which doesn't support the mimetic thesis. If you drill down to try to derive native TFR in the US and other Western countries, it's very low and quite similar or not much greater to China's TFR. The higher TFR rates are driven largely by replacement immigration, and here China has obviously taken the opposite tack.
On the broader point of this piece, I would argue the exact opposite. The whole genre of China commentary, including this piece, is ultimately motivated by a sense that China is not mimetic and thus any relative increase in its economic and political power, even if it doesn't supplant the US, lowers to a degree the status and prestige of the US and those that derive their status, influence, and sense of power from the US's standing. Whether you're a Trumpian nationalist, center-left neolib, Woke leftist, or Hayekian libertarian, no increase in China's economic/political power is going to be taken as a mimetic vindication of your ideology.
China does seem to have a remarkable ability to copy bad ideas from the West and ruthlessly crush the good ones.
The one child policy was a terrible idea that was very popular among the western left when China adopted it. They held onto for far too long. As a result, China is very likely to get old before it gets rich, with tragic consequences.
When they go against the grain of what the west is doing, it is a good sign they are making a mistake. Covid lock-downs, for instance. They were proud of them and greatly enjoyed lecturing us about our own mistakes in being insufficiently strict.
By the way, on milk. A huge part of China's dairy industry was started with Canadian development aid in the 80s. I toured many a rural Chinese dairy operation back in the day. It was a straight up grant which, had it instead been equity, would have been 100x in returns. However, our aid folks were deaf to the idea of an equity investment, even though the Chinese partners would totally have agreed (the financial structure it would have created would have given the Chinese insiders lots of ways to get rich and out of the country, ways they likely figured out anyway).
Great piece, although I wonder how much of this is really in the West's control. People respect things that are more powerful than them, but the dominant narrative from China for the past few decades has been that the West (America particularly) is in decline. Why would they keep trying to ape the habits of a declining power? A lot of what they're currently doing is probably institutional inertia.
The milk in China, as in similar countries like Japan and South Korea, tends to have reduced lactose. If you've been to these countries and tried the typical grocery store milk there, you'd know this because the milk tastes a bit different. South Korea and Japan did have successful postwar campaigns to increase milk consumption among schoolchildren and younger adults, and nutrition and height increased as a result. Milk, besides being calorically dense, is loaded with IGF-1, insulin like growth factor, which promotes tissue growth. Promoting milk is exactly the sort of intervention an intelligent bureaucrat would believe, especially since it's been tried and tested in similar countries like Japan and South Korea.
As for EV overcapacity and the Belt & Road, they're driven largely by political and security concerns, rather than by some calculus to maximize returns to capital, so criticizing them on the grounds that they waste capital and limit returns doesn't make sense.
And the fertility issue is a case which doesn't support the mimetic thesis. If you drill down to try to derive native TFR in the US and other Western countries, it's very low and quite similar or not much greater to China's TFR. The higher TFR rates are driven largely by replacement immigration, and here China has obviously taken the opposite tack.
On the broader point of this piece, I would argue the exact opposite. The whole genre of China commentary, including this piece, is ultimately motivated by a sense that China is not mimetic and thus any relative increase in its economic and political power, even if it doesn't supplant the US, lowers to a degree the status and prestige of the US and those that derive their status, influence, and sense of power from the US's standing. Whether you're a Trumpian nationalist, center-left neolib, Woke leftist, or Hayekian libertarian, no increase in China's economic/political power is going to be taken as a mimetic vindication of your ideology.
See “Yakult.” Good piece.