This is what Western governments miss: China didn’t get rich from its surveillance state - it got rich from manufacturing, much of it handed to them by the West. If we were serious about prosperity, we’d be copying their industrial base, not their domestic spying. But rebuilding skills and factories is hard; building tools to monitor and manage a population in decline is easy - and far more entertaining for a state that seems to prefer watching the poor struggle to fixing the conditions that keep them there.
> If we were serious about prosperity, we’d be copying their industrial base,
Why would we work down the prosperity chain?
There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies.
Yeah, industrialization has been important for China’s recent development just as it was for the US in the late 19th to early 20th centuries or for Britain a bit earlier. But it was important because it happened at a time when China was at a lower tier in the heirarchy.
>There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies.
This is very wrong, in the sense that not everyone can do "financing/services". Lots of people, even some on this website in fact, pretend that everyone can but it just isn't true. What financializing your economy does is exacerbate existing inequalities, or build new ones where they didn't exist.
It's also, ahem, a very bad idea to intentionally deconstruct your industrial base so you can make a couple bps every quarter. The reasons for this should be quite obvious, but since for many they apparently are not ... there are very real geopolitical tensions between PRC and the US, and these tensions present a very real possibility of war. Should that happen, PRC will have the ability to squeeze US supply chains in a very devastating way. This isn't to say it would provide them an easy path to victory, but just the ability to do this increases the probability that they would initiate a conflict in the first place. This is to say that there is no such thing as a "prosperity chain" that everyone should all strive to emulate.
> There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies.
Drive through the metro areas of the Great Lakes and Great Plains states and tell me that's universally true.
There's a bump in prosperity for the people doing the financing and servicing in a given country. If you're not doing that, it's at best a wash. At worst it's turned otherwise sustainable communities into impoverished deathtraps.
But these said economies all seem to just focus on asset-buying. Hence the massive house inflation. They don't make anything. No production, only asset-accumulation.
Building a Feudal Economy.
That “hierarchy” only works if the foundations stay intact. A service/finance economy without domestic manufacturing is like a skyscraper with no lower floors - great view until the support gives way. Manufacturing isn’t just a rung you discard, it’s strategic infrastructure. Lose it and you become dependent on those “lower tier” nations for essentials - and your position in the hierarchy is theirs to decide.
And participation in the service economy isn’t even open to everyone. In the UK, a working-class person can’t just start a small service business - IR35 and similar rules ensure they can’t make a profit. The rich have captured both the economy and policymaking, shifting into pure wealth extraction mode. Everything gets more expensive, ordinary people get poorer, and with no stake in production or ownership, there’s no one left to buy the services the “upper tier” depends on. Western capitalism is eating itself.
