This Pandemic has really exposed the rotting core of America, which has been in decline ever since the end of the Cold War.
That is a reason why many in the US have always been keen to start a new Cold War with China. But that is, depending on their understanding and motivations, either hopelessly naive or outright delusional.
For the realist in America, they recognise that the key reason their once might house is crumbling around their ears is because the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
During the Cold War, the American government was firmly in charge, and they harnessed and directed the might of the American economy, industry and academia towards a simple but ambitious goal - economic, technological and social advancement to outdo the Soviets. Ironically, in a very similar fashion as to what China is doing now.
Where America succeeded and the Soviets failed was the degree of autonomy the state allowed firms and the economy. While the Soviets tried and failed to plan for every last minute detail of economic activity, America limited itself to the big picture and setting general aims and directions and leaving industry to figure out the best way to get there through natural selection via the market.
Part of the cause of the soviet failure was that their central planning apparatus sucked in more and more of their best and brightest minds and essentially wasted their talents and potential doing meaningless paper pushing and make work rather than truly productive and creative enterprises that might have created value.
If that sounds familiar, it is because America has fallen into the same trap with Wall Street.
Like the soviet central planning apparatus, Wall Street sucks in a disastrous proportion of the finest minds in the west, and allocated vast sums of money based on ever increasingly complex and convoluted models and formula that are ever more divorced from reality.
On the political front, the fall of the Soviets has meant that the American political classes have become way too pleased with themselves. Sitting on their laurels would not even come close to describing their excesses. No, they started almost immediately to re-write history to make America’s triumph seem almost divinely ordained and entirely down to the purity of their belief in their system of governance, and in doing so created a de facto new religion with themselves as the high priests.
Ideological purity is now the most important factor in determining the success of men and ideas in the west. Realists are not even given a chance while ideological zealots can be wrong in every one of their predictions yet still somehow have high profile jobs of their pick and endless appearances on TV and Radio.
So reverently do the priest believe in their new Gods of Democracy and Free Market that they have thrown themselves into their new holy task of stripping out the impure and fallible hands of men from governance. Hence all zealotry with which they try to strip away the powers of the state and leave it all to their god the ‘market’. In effect, this is like practicing ‘Jesus Take the Wheel’ on a national level.
But Jesus didn’t take the wheel, big business and powerful individuals did by first moving into the power vacuum the retreat of government left, and then using their newfound power and wealth to pure further and achieve state capture through ownership of the media, and the creation of the electoral campaign funding arms race.
On the technological front, America’s once unassailable technological dominance, built on the backs of British and German technological base, as well as its own vast R&D budgets, started to be systematically eroded by a triple whammy of: Wall Street stripping it of the best minds available; the retreat of government and slashing of government R&D budgets, and the major scientific breakthroughs thwhy produced which corporate America’s technological supremacy is based upon (the iPhone is my favourite case study for this, as of the 10 most critical technologies that made it, and all subsequent smartphones possible, every one was originally created by US government, usually military, R&D programmes); and finally, through state capture, major companies were able to ever expand patent protection even as government regulations and protections where being stripped away almost everywhere else. The result is an unmitigated disaster where ridiculously vague and broad patents were, and continue to be issued, allowing companies to monopolise critical technologies and processes which should have been industry standards, thereby allowing them to corner the market and extract excessive profits. This has massively misdirected America private R&D, as increasingly private R&D is becoming about re-inventing the wheel to do the same thing as what existing technology a rival firm has patented first can do, instead of pushing out the frontiers of what is possible.
The west loves to snipe at Chinese ‘copying’, but that is only because Chinese scientists don’t see the value or point in literally reinventing the wheel just to have a slightly different wheel that they can claim to be unique, but which only does what existing wheels already do.
China is taking existing technologies that works, and building upon that to make something better. That is why ‘knock-off’ Chinese products often have more features and capabilities then what they were supposed to have copied.
Rather than focus all their time and effort on the skin-deep differentiation that now passes for innovation in the west, Chinese industry are instead standing on the shoulder of giants and using existing technologies to leap onto new higher horizons. That is why it is increasingly Chinese companies that are bring out all the new ideas and cool features, while western products just seem like incremental improvements repackaged in a prettier and more polished shell.
And I think this is only just the start for Chinese Tech, because a large part of existing commercial tech are still living off the legacy of Cold War American military R&D. But as Chinese state directed R&D start to bear fruit (areas to watch are quantum computing, fusion, renewable power and next gen battery tech just for starters), we will start to see Chinese commercial tech turboboost ahead of western competitors, who will, ironically start to reverse engineer Chinese commercial products to boost their own tech base.
All of these factors have been brewing on the background for decades. It is only with the harsh light of the pandemic that we can actually see through all the western media spin and political lies to the underlying truth underneath.
In many respects, COVID19 is a turning point in history. But from China’s POV, it would have been better if it could have waited a decade or two, by which point Chinese dominance would have become all but unassailable. But now, if enough of Americans gets a wake up call from COVID to see how far they have fallen and how close China has gained on them, it could make for a much closer and harder race than what Chinese leaders were hoping for.
