Observers in Communist China have formulated a term 無限上綱 which describes a process very similar to what the author has described. I don't know how the term was formulated initially. My understanding is that it means a process of continuously, incrementally push up a standard. Usually each tiny step seems achievable, and the original direction seems noble. Yet after a while, most people will realize that we have screwed ourselves up.
One example is the refugee problem in Europe. If Europe was rich enough, had spaces, had the preparation, and had the consensus to accept refugees, there was nothing wrong in accepting some refugees. But the society was not that rich and not that ready. The instigators would then say, although we are hungry, every one of us can spare one spoon of food to feed these starving refugees. Next is to share your blanket, then your front porch with refugees. It is NOT that one should NOT share the front-porch with refugees, but rather that the whole thing should have been planned and executed with proper resources allocated. Instead, European politicians simply highlight the moral high ground that we Europeans certainly can afford to feed an extra 10 million refugees. So they come, but Europe has no space to house them. Then, on a humanitarian basis, these refugees were able to enjoy some basic human pleasures, like snacks, maybe a few movies a week, or opportunities to relieve biological pressure.
The lesson I learned from China's social phenomena is that while morality is definitely essential to human society, one needs to pay close scrutiny to people who push others to higher moral standards without themselves moving first. Moral high ground is a nice place to be, but it takes resources, courage, and sacrifices to go up there and stay there. In the real world, both resources and bravery are in short supply. For example, does Zelensky's son join the Azov storm troopers? Does DJT's son volunteer to serve in front-line infantry or man a Patriots battery in Qatar? Does Merkel's house adopt a few refugees and keep them warm? Does Starmer let his daughter serve in the refugee camp? The draft may be cruel. The moral high ground may be too tough to conquer, but if the king and his sons lead the men in a charge at the front, I am sure that a lot of complaining would go silent.
a few decades ago the western-West, especially the UK and the USA, mostly completed a great structural transformation from being systems with deep institutional traditions of federated decision making and geographic, sectoral, and societal diffusion of power, authority, and access to decision making within policy variable environments into deeply centralized and standardized systems with very exclusionary access to decision making.
China has maintained distributed and diffused federated decision making with diversified access and the accompanying legal/regulatory variability, policy variability, financial structures pluralization, decentralized government, decentralized academe, etc to enable that
The China described by you has never existed to the best of my knowledge before 1949 or after 1949. Please go talk to some of your Chinese friends and ask about them.
You are verifiably wrong. Lets look at just a few recent examples. Quite recent communications from Xi and Co and the central government have been calling for centralization of the banking system, and an elimination of locally directed financially policy and regulatory variability, so they dont have it now.
Or just look at Trump’s recent trip; when Trump or nvidia ceo Jensen say “open up” China, well there are some forums where they do provide specifics and what they mean is they was a much deep centralization and de-democratization of China to enforce intensive standardizations in policy to eliminate China’s traditional local level legal/regulatory and policy variances
Look at the fiscal layouyt, local governments make up most all government revenue intake AND spending (its important that its both sides, its their money) so local fiscal dominance
People’s Daily explains that reform success came from combining national frameworks with local experimentation and adaptive trial-and-error governance.
People’s Daily Theory section explicitly argues China’s governance system requires both central coordination and strong local initiative, instead of uniformity.
Fiscal decentralization and local developmental incentives
This People’s Daily commentary discusses how China’s fiscal structure historically incentivized local governments to pursue growth and development through locally directed policy execution.
Governance must adapt to differing local conditions
People’s Daily states that China’s governance mechanisms must account for major regional and local variation and warns against simplistic “one-size-fits-all” approaches.
People’s Network reviews Deng-era reforms and explicitly states that “delegating power” to lower levels was considered a core feature of reform and center-local restructuring.
But as Confucius said, listen to what people say and examine what they actually do. If you believe all of these, you are on the right track to somewhere.
Great summary. Polyanskiy’s and Karaganov’s recent statements should be required reading for any serious European leader. Problem is Europe doesn’t appear to have any serious leaders.
Russia has reached the point where the cost of not responding to European agression and provocation is considered greater than responding. So now it is just a question of timing.
Yeah, we only have to be wrong once and UK is over. Would just take 3 nukes. I'm no pacifist but like this article points out we've arrived at the brink for all the wrong reasons. Hubris anyway, what's the royal navy now? 30k? army 75k (we have twice as many police officers)
What should I say? Sadly this is really the way Selenkyy is perceived in Western anti-russian media. There are ofcourse western European nations that are more distant or atleast more plausible in their actions (Ireland, Spain, Portugal). I think they are not just against Israels war but also the one started under Joe Bidens guiandance and now being strongly supported by Brussels. They are on neithers side.
Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcomes.
The incentives are clear and obvious for anyone in that sphere. More budgets, more jobs, more empire building, more propaganda, more lying to ourselves, lobbying ourselves into abject stupidity.
Nobody in 77 Brigade, Whitehall, the arms industries or think tanks is going to get promoted for saying that the Emperor has no clothes.
Russia knew this. We were entirely predictable. Kursk, the invasion of Russia itself, was indeed hailed as an act of Strategic and tactical genius. In that it generated a few headlines. On the ground it wasn't quite as bad as I predicted, probably roughly even in terms of men and materiel lost, though that represented most of their best kit. Thrown away on a road to nowhere, a single road which represented their entire logistics. A hope and a prayer.
But let us disabused ourselves of a few notions. This is not an industrial war. The EU has been bragging about increasing artillery shell production over 5x to almost 1.5 million rounds per year. The UK alone in 1917 was producing 1.5 million per week. A factor of 50. Though our shells were mainly for use over about 100km of front line. In Ukraine it is 1200km. You are getting well toward three orders of magnitude less.
It is also not a war of national survival. Not even for Ukraine, as they're already dead. Certainly not for Russia who, contrary to our propaganda are not going to run out of Vodka, patriotism or tanks.
It is fundamentally a war over food, or rather who controls it. Pure Kissingerian politics. There's only a handful of breadbaskets in the world, nine countries that export far more food than they consume. Ukraine is one of the largest and much of their produce feeds the Middle East plus North and East Africa. Control the food and you control those peoples.
Which is a problem as it includes Israel. Who to be fair did try to become more self sufficient by building ruinously expensive nuclear desalination plants such that farmers could grow crops. Trouble is that flowers paid more than grain.
The weird thing about the Ukraine was is that Russia is not trying to win it. Putin's speech on the matter was an explicit declaration of war, which is perfectly legal under our 'Rules based International Order'. Hence no propagandist will ever mention the matter without mentioning that it is illegal.
He stated the war's limited aims in great clarity. Demilitarise Ukraine, Denazify Ukraine and bring those responsible to justice without occupying their territory. He was quite explicit on the latter point.
The only aims which have wandered are their new requirement to demilitarize and denazify Nato due to their rather predictable cuck strop.
So why would they not push to the river, they have the capability. Because that is the most productive farmland on earth and the ME imports anything up to 95% of it's food depending upon the country. Israel would be more than threatened, as Bennett's frenetic diplomatic trips showed.
So instead you have 1200km of no man's land at leat 25km deep. The only thing that exists there is very brave eyes and ears desperately trying not to be detected. Detection means a Platypus, a Su-34 Hellduck lofting 1000lb of HE onto your position from 60km out. They can't be defended from, too far away for either fighters or SAMs to reach. Or a fire mission from artillery. Or a swarm of FPV drones.
Two years ago the number of Ukrainians maimed, their amputees, stood at 120,000. Historical rates of dead to anputees stand between 6 and 18. The latter being our own WW1 figures and the former being GWOT ones with exceptional American casevac and medical care. Ukraine does not in any realistic sense even have medevac from the front. A society which was 40 million strong saw half being pensioners before the war. Of the remaining 20 million half were women. Of the remaining 10 million about a third were children. Of the remaining 7 million only half would be even capable of being conscripted. Have no doubt their KIAs alone are in the million plus range.
That is what destruction of Ukraine's military means to Moscow. Sit there and plink with artillery, drones and CAS over a huge front to attrite their manpower, which they are likely doing at a 20:1 rate. I trust the firepower equation on this, not our own propaganda.
Hence the calls for conscription in the EU, as frankly Ukraine are finished. Losing 30k men a month and maybe 5k replacements.
That is two generations either dead or dying, the females fled and are not going to give up a school place in Germany to return to a country of cripples and OAPs. What industry remains creates comically bad weaponry and can't keep the lights on. They sold their fields to Blackrock.
The war only ends when Zelensky and Boris Johnson are handed over to face trial. Genocide by enemy action. I personally would do so in an instant.
I constantly ponder why do politicians always seem to serve and worry about someone else's nation, rather than the one they were elected to serve. I might add one rarely sees a manifesto at election time promising to look after another nation before their own.
Good paper. For years now, I've been scratching my head, wondering how western leaders could be so insane and incompetent. Surely, there must be some method in the madness that I'm not seeing, I thought. Alas, everything is largely as it seems and we now hang on the precipice. God help us all.
The biggest driver of this is that a few decades ago the western-West, especially the UK and the USA, mostly completed a great structural transformation from being systems with deep institutional traditions of federated decision making and geographic, sectoral, and societal diffusion of power, authority, and access to decision making within policy variable environments into deeply centralized and standardized systems with very exclusionary access to decision making.
Good article, "This is how you destroy your own credibility, your own energy access, how you outsource everything you depend on to a China you now demonise." reminds me of a genius sketch on Utopia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgspkxfkS4k
That is a useful point of reference. The East India Company continually expanded its' influence until so large it was nationalised.
It would be too obvious to say the UK is driven by corporatism or crony capitalism, yet, the ability to create money, and then distribute that to chosen benefactors is how the state choses to expand, and there is no resistance to that expansion.
The only question is: how do you nationalise a state?
Wow Frank, I've just seen your makerfield interview for vox populi on YouTube! 👏👏
Well I do apologise for going on.
Congratulations, Mr. Right. I saw it all blowing up in "real time" on titter, and I cheered for you.
Off to be interviewed by Tucker Carlson next, please.
You were bloody brilliant! What a fantastic character you are
Well that is very kind of you and I am glad I did not waste your time. Thank you SoS old chap.
Observers in Communist China have formulated a term 無限上綱 which describes a process very similar to what the author has described. I don't know how the term was formulated initially. My understanding is that it means a process of continuously, incrementally push up a standard. Usually each tiny step seems achievable, and the original direction seems noble. Yet after a while, most people will realize that we have screwed ourselves up.
One example is the refugee problem in Europe. If Europe was rich enough, had spaces, had the preparation, and had the consensus to accept refugees, there was nothing wrong in accepting some refugees. But the society was not that rich and not that ready. The instigators would then say, although we are hungry, every one of us can spare one spoon of food to feed these starving refugees. Next is to share your blanket, then your front porch with refugees. It is NOT that one should NOT share the front-porch with refugees, but rather that the whole thing should have been planned and executed with proper resources allocated. Instead, European politicians simply highlight the moral high ground that we Europeans certainly can afford to feed an extra 10 million refugees. So they come, but Europe has no space to house them. Then, on a humanitarian basis, these refugees were able to enjoy some basic human pleasures, like snacks, maybe a few movies a week, or opportunities to relieve biological pressure.
The lesson I learned from China's social phenomena is that while morality is definitely essential to human society, one needs to pay close scrutiny to people who push others to higher moral standards without themselves moving first. Moral high ground is a nice place to be, but it takes resources, courage, and sacrifices to go up there and stay there. In the real world, both resources and bravery are in short supply. For example, does Zelensky's son join the Azov storm troopers? Does DJT's son volunteer to serve in front-line infantry or man a Patriots battery in Qatar? Does Merkel's house adopt a few refugees and keep them warm? Does Starmer let his daughter serve in the refugee camp? The draft may be cruel. The moral high ground may be too tough to conquer, but if the king and his sons lead the men in a charge at the front, I am sure that a lot of complaining would go silent.
This is a very insightful comment and I did not know that Chinese phrase. Thank you Nakayama!
a few decades ago the western-West, especially the UK and the USA, mostly completed a great structural transformation from being systems with deep institutional traditions of federated decision making and geographic, sectoral, and societal diffusion of power, authority, and access to decision making within policy variable environments into deeply centralized and standardized systems with very exclusionary access to decision making.
China has maintained distributed and diffused federated decision making with diversified access and the accompanying legal/regulatory variability, policy variability, financial structures pluralization, decentralized government, decentralized academe, etc to enable that
The China described by you has never existed to the best of my knowledge before 1949 or after 1949. Please go talk to some of your Chinese friends and ask about them.
You are verifiably wrong. Lets look at just a few recent examples. Quite recent communications from Xi and Co and the central government have been calling for centralization of the banking system, and an elimination of locally directed financially policy and regulatory variability, so they dont have it now.
Or just look at Trump’s recent trip; when Trump or nvidia ceo Jensen say “open up” China, well there are some forums where they do provide specifics and what they mean is they was a much deep centralization and de-democratization of China to enforce intensive standardizations in policy to eliminate China’s traditional local level legal/regulatory and policy variances
Look at the fiscal layouyt, local governments make up most all government revenue intake AND spending (its important that its both sides, its their money) so local fiscal dominance
I could go on
Sorry. I don't know which country you are talking about. Read some Chinese language media, including People's Daily (party central newspaper).
Great Idea!
Top-level design + local experimentation (“crossing the river by feeling the stones”)
http://cpc.people.com.cn/pinglun/n/2013/0812/c78779-22525741.html
People’s Daily explains that reform success came from combining national frameworks with local experimentation and adaptive trial-and-error governance.
“Give play to both central and local initiative”
http://theory.people.com.cn/n1/2019/1210/c40531-31497968.html
People’s Daily Theory section explicitly argues China’s governance system requires both central coordination and strong local initiative, instead of uniformity.
Fiscal decentralization and local developmental incentives
http://opinion.people.com.cn/n1/2020/0331/c1003-31654662.html
This People’s Daily commentary discusses how China’s fiscal structure historically incentivized local governments to pursue growth and development through locally directed policy execution.
Governance must adapt to differing local conditions
http://opinion.people.com.cn/BIG5/n1/2019/1205/c1003-31490512.html
People’s Daily states that China’s governance mechanisms must account for major regional and local variation and warns against simplistic “one-size-fits-all” approaches.
Deng Xiaoping on delegating power downward
http://cpc.people.com.cn/n/2014/0606/c69113-25113260.html
People’s Network reviews Deng-era reforms and explicitly states that “delegating power” to lower levels was considered a core feature of reform and center-local restructuring.
Outstanding! You should read more.
But as Confucius said, listen to what people say and examine what they actually do. If you believe all of these, you are on the right track to somewhere.
Great summary. Polyanskiy’s and Karaganov’s recent statements should be required reading for any serious European leader. Problem is Europe doesn’t appear to have any serious leaders.
Russia has reached the point where the cost of not responding to European agression and provocation is considered greater than responding. So now it is just a question of timing.
Simulacrum politics. Fun and games until a thermonuclear warhead is dropped on your ass.
Yeah, we only have to be wrong once and UK is over. Would just take 3 nukes. I'm no pacifist but like this article points out we've arrived at the brink for all the wrong reasons. Hubris anyway, what's the royal navy now? 30k? army 75k (we have twice as many police officers)
What should I say? Sadly this is really the way Selenkyy is perceived in Western anti-russian media. There are ofcourse western European nations that are more distant or atleast more plausible in their actions (Ireland, Spain, Portugal). I think they are not just against Israels war but also the one started under Joe Bidens guiandance and now being strongly supported by Brussels. They are on neithers side.
Blessings and appreciation from Sydney Aus.
Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcomes.
The incentives are clear and obvious for anyone in that sphere. More budgets, more jobs, more empire building, more propaganda, more lying to ourselves, lobbying ourselves into abject stupidity.
Nobody in 77 Brigade, Whitehall, the arms industries or think tanks is going to get promoted for saying that the Emperor has no clothes.
Russia knew this. We were entirely predictable. Kursk, the invasion of Russia itself, was indeed hailed as an act of Strategic and tactical genius. In that it generated a few headlines. On the ground it wasn't quite as bad as I predicted, probably roughly even in terms of men and materiel lost, though that represented most of their best kit. Thrown away on a road to nowhere, a single road which represented their entire logistics. A hope and a prayer.
But let us disabused ourselves of a few notions. This is not an industrial war. The EU has been bragging about increasing artillery shell production over 5x to almost 1.5 million rounds per year. The UK alone in 1917 was producing 1.5 million per week. A factor of 50. Though our shells were mainly for use over about 100km of front line. In Ukraine it is 1200km. You are getting well toward three orders of magnitude less.
It is also not a war of national survival. Not even for Ukraine, as they're already dead. Certainly not for Russia who, contrary to our propaganda are not going to run out of Vodka, patriotism or tanks.
It is fundamentally a war over food, or rather who controls it. Pure Kissingerian politics. There's only a handful of breadbaskets in the world, nine countries that export far more food than they consume. Ukraine is one of the largest and much of their produce feeds the Middle East plus North and East Africa. Control the food and you control those peoples.
Which is a problem as it includes Israel. Who to be fair did try to become more self sufficient by building ruinously expensive nuclear desalination plants such that farmers could grow crops. Trouble is that flowers paid more than grain.
The weird thing about the Ukraine was is that Russia is not trying to win it. Putin's speech on the matter was an explicit declaration of war, which is perfectly legal under our 'Rules based International Order'. Hence no propagandist will ever mention the matter without mentioning that it is illegal.
He stated the war's limited aims in great clarity. Demilitarise Ukraine, Denazify Ukraine and bring those responsible to justice without occupying their territory. He was quite explicit on the latter point.
The only aims which have wandered are their new requirement to demilitarize and denazify Nato due to their rather predictable cuck strop.
So why would they not push to the river, they have the capability. Because that is the most productive farmland on earth and the ME imports anything up to 95% of it's food depending upon the country. Israel would be more than threatened, as Bennett's frenetic diplomatic trips showed.
So instead you have 1200km of no man's land at leat 25km deep. The only thing that exists there is very brave eyes and ears desperately trying not to be detected. Detection means a Platypus, a Su-34 Hellduck lofting 1000lb of HE onto your position from 60km out. They can't be defended from, too far away for either fighters or SAMs to reach. Or a fire mission from artillery. Or a swarm of FPV drones.
Two years ago the number of Ukrainians maimed, their amputees, stood at 120,000. Historical rates of dead to anputees stand between 6 and 18. The latter being our own WW1 figures and the former being GWOT ones with exceptional American casevac and medical care. Ukraine does not in any realistic sense even have medevac from the front. A society which was 40 million strong saw half being pensioners before the war. Of the remaining 20 million half were women. Of the remaining 10 million about a third were children. Of the remaining 7 million only half would be even capable of being conscripted. Have no doubt their KIAs alone are in the million plus range.
That is what destruction of Ukraine's military means to Moscow. Sit there and plink with artillery, drones and CAS over a huge front to attrite their manpower, which they are likely doing at a 20:1 rate. I trust the firepower equation on this, not our own propaganda.
Hence the calls for conscription in the EU, as frankly Ukraine are finished. Losing 30k men a month and maybe 5k replacements.
That is two generations either dead or dying, the females fled and are not going to give up a school place in Germany to return to a country of cripples and OAPs. What industry remains creates comically bad weaponry and can't keep the lights on. They sold their fields to Blackrock.
The war only ends when Zelensky and Boris Johnson are handed over to face trial. Genocide by enemy action. I personally would do so in an instant.
I constantly ponder why do politicians always seem to serve and worry about someone else's nation, rather than the one they were elected to serve. I might add one rarely sees a manifesto at election time promising to look after another nation before their own.
Good paper. For years now, I've been scratching my head, wondering how western leaders could be so insane and incompetent. Surely, there must be some method in the madness that I'm not seeing, I thought. Alas, everything is largely as it seems and we now hang on the precipice. God help us all.
The biggest driver of this is that a few decades ago the western-West, especially the UK and the USA, mostly completed a great structural transformation from being systems with deep institutional traditions of federated decision making and geographic, sectoral, and societal diffusion of power, authority, and access to decision making within policy variable environments into deeply centralized and standardized systems with very exclusionary access to decision making.
Good article, "This is how you destroy your own credibility, your own energy access, how you outsource everything you depend on to a China you now demonise." reminds me of a genius sketch on Utopia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgspkxfkS4k
That is a useful point of reference. The East India Company continually expanded its' influence until so large it was nationalised.
It would be too obvious to say the UK is driven by corporatism or crony capitalism, yet, the ability to create money, and then distribute that to chosen benefactors is how the state choses to expand, and there is no resistance to that expansion.
The only question is: how do you nationalise a state?