China: The Bubble That Never Pops
China looms increasingly large in European lives, its rise must have caused it to be discussed around more tables than it was in my Childhood.
Yet compared with Europe, or the US I still feel painful sense of the naivety of British discourse around the country. I think many western takes are painfully thin, principle based gestures aimed at trying to boil away the complexity into simple lines.
I’m encouraged in this though by some of my favourite authors and broadcasters about China. For nearly 15 years now I’ve listen to Kaiser Guo’s Sinica Podcast, and increasingly desperate pleas for an examination with neither “Fear nor favour”. The quality of those debates, the detail and nuance often eclipses what you can find in western columns and briefings.
This book is a contribution to that discourse of detail in two major ways.
Firstly its economic specificity and scope is impressive. A continual sense of how China and its economic agents saw the country to a brink and steered around it. With a consistency that begins to defy dumb luck. The book goes into detail on the string of economic crises weathered and survived. The arguments seem well made and compelling, to distill their merit or gaps more would required an economic literacy beyond my own. I’ll likely seek out some reviews or comments from economic thinkers I trust, to see where reasonable debate might exist in the wider narrative.
It’s second contribution was the phrase that led me to the book. Made almost as a throwaway comment towards the end. Sinophrenia.
The simultaneous belief that China is about to collapse and about to take over the world.
The line doesn’t loom large, but it makes a point about the extremely poorly grounded thinking of much of the West about China. To the extent of comfort with the doublethink of illogical ends at once. I suspect it also provides justification for a book of this detail pitched as an antedote. Perhaps self serving, but I’m there for it.
There are few things I can say with confidence about how world history will progress for the rest of my life. I’m convinced we can say some things though, demographic trends that will take 30 years to play out. Climate trends that will take 30 to reveal themselves and hundreds of years to work through.
I am convinced China will be one of a handful of countries whose policy, politics and performance will have impacts that shape the world I live in. I feel existentially uncomfortable not trying to understand those forces in more detail and this Book is a good contribution to that cause.
After "China - The bubble that never pops" I read: My Brilliant Friend
Before "China - The bubble that never pops" I read: The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition