Was Mao ours?
Speaking of cat tricks, Wolf Richter is reporting on China's long overdue and RATIONAL crackdown on debt and bitcoin. Xi is trying to rein in unnecessary overuse of energy, partly because natural gas prices have gone through the roof. He's allowing overindebted financiers to fail, instead of bailing them out as Communist countries like US and UK have done.

Our tech sector is taking a hit because we depend on China's wastefulness. This shouldn't have been a surprise; before 1976 everyone understood that GIVING YOUR ENTIRE ECONOMY TO A HOSTILE COUNTRY was not a smart move. A sovereign and sane nation may serve your purposes for a while, but ultimately it will serve its own people FIRST.

Since I'm in 1957 mode this month, an odd alt-history thought popped up.

Was Mao our SOB?

He certainly didn't appear to be ours. I know this in a semi-personal way from my father's WW2 Navy service in China. We were nation-building, trying to shore up Chiang's weak forces to resist Mao's nationalism. As fucking always, our nation-building helped Mao win. Chiang was seen as foreign, and Mao was native.

Here's where the alt-history comes in. If Chiang had stayed in power, where would China be now? Chiang was firmly capitalist, so China's natural bets-and-debts tendency would have been allowed to run wild. Our companies would have offshored in 1950 instead of 1980. We would have collapsed much sooner, and China would have won much sooner.

Our healthy growth from 1946 to 1976 was possible because our corporations had a less attractive option overseas. They allowed Japan to take over consumer electronics starting in 1957, but all other parts of industry stayed home until 1976 when Mao died.

Mao did us a huge favor by turning China into an abysmally nonfunctional and chaotic country. His 1957 Great Leap Forward was profoundly stupid, running contrary to all the innate Chinese tendencies. China is ME-FIRST, ferociously obsessed with betting and money and competition. Mao tried to eliminate all of those innate tendencies, and ended up killing millions of his own people. Great for us, horrible for China. Our SOB.

Labels: Alternate universe

  ¶ 4:58 AM