Category: Politics – Dictatorial

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WARNING: LONG POST

The Book of the Week is “Breakneck, China’s Quest to Engineer the Future” by Dan Wang, published in 2025. In this hodgepodge of a volume whose language is awkward in spots, the author made vast generalizations in comparing China to the United States, sometimes oversimplifying things.

The author contended that China’s economy has grown in leaps and bounds economically in the last few decades because its government has thrown vast resources into engineering.

The author argued that the United States is in political and economic decline: due to its obstructionist legal system, and for failing to stop the offshoring of its factories to lower-cost facilities in China.

Capitalism involves profit-seeking. Communism involves a government that steals the economic surplus of the profit-seekers. Socialism is a collective, non-profit-seeking effort to provide essential services that fulfill basic human needs such as food and shelter. Some believe that the government is obligated to provide these essential services to the people.

Historically, business start-ups in the capitalist economic system have been forced to rely on mostly private funding. In the United States, when a business becomes monster-sized and politically entrenched, it gets government assistance in terms of tax breaks and legislative favoritism. The United States government sometimes makes taxpayers pay for a corporate bailout after executives have bankrupted their employer.

China’s Communist system grants a revolving credit facility to all businesses that start to show profitability, taking a financial interest in them. Some businesses still go bankrupt later on, due to a proliferation of fierce competitors engaged in price wars, because they jump into making products unrelated to their core competencies. Those failed companies don’t get bailed out. There is creative destruction.

Economics 101 says a nation needs to have a healthy, well-educated workforce to stay in good economic shape. Both China and the United States sabotage themselves in this regard in different ways.

China has become capitalistic of late– rewarding entrepreneurs who build hospitals rather than their staffs who dispense their medical expertise, resulting in engineers with robust financial health, and patients with poor physical health.

In the United States, whenever the government tries to be socialistic– say, by passing laws that financially benefit consumers who are patients, students or tenants– the medical providers, schools and landlords whose bottom lines are adversely affected, simply pass the extra costs onto those consumers by raising prices!

The bright spot in America’s selling out its manufacturing is: worldwide economic incestuousness has given rise to co-dependence, and thus forced cooperation among rivalrous nations. All the countries heavily involved on the world stage must sit down at the bargaining table now, or their own people will face severe economic hardships.

Of course, there have been world leaders in the recent past whose heartlessness sparked peasant revolts. The current leaders know that, and in order to stay in power, they keep their populations just fat and happy enough, amid their saber-rattling at their (phony) enemies.

The author commented that Boeing lost its way. It used to have a knowledge base– had a reputation for institutional memory– learning from mistakes. Its products inevitably would improve because it paid attention to process. Now China is the country obsessed with process rather than product.

A stupid employer has workers meet to discuss a recently failed project, but whose list of suggestions of how to do better in the future is shoved in a drawer, never to be seen again. A wise employer will add the list to its knowledge-base so no one has to reinvent the wheel. China currently has the latter bent.

Other factors at play in the current situation include: China has one-Party rule while America’s two political parties are in a constant tug-of-war over how to deal with its fragmented and complex economic issues. True, America’s production of consumer goods has drastically declined in recent decades, while all kinds of services now drive its economy. Its attorneys are obstructionist; however, the glacial pace of construction of infrastructure is also due to the politicians’ goal to stay in power.

No voters want politicians to raise taxes to pay for infrastructure. So the politicians don’t raise taxes; so, no infrastructure. Besides, ground-breaking ceremonies are long forgotten at re-election time. Politicians know that campaigns are more likely to succeed through mudslinging rather than through (usually empty) bragging about accomplishments.

The author asks a question for the ages: “Should it [the United States] really go all in on artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, and other things that the Communist Party mocks as fictitious economy?”

Read the book to learn about additional issues facing China and America, their histories, and about their quest to dominate the world while they have been reversing their roles of late, politically and economically.

One last telling quote: “His reign was characterized by regulatory forbearance, perhaps because he was a personal beneficiary of the sector’s growth.” – written about Lu Wei, director of the Cyberspace Administration in China, the chief internet regulator prior to 2018. Sounds familiar.

ENDNOTE: The author failed to mention that, prior to this writing, the United States had illegal immigrants making significant contributions to its GDP, while China’s sex industry makes significant contributions to its GDP. Sexual issues in China are linked to its “underground” economy, while sexual issues in the United States are a whole different ball of wax.

Speaking of such issues in the United States, two assumptions apply in connection with unwanted sexual advances.

1. The crimes were more evil when the victims were under eighteen years of age.
2. If the alleged perpetrator was punished through jail time, job loss or fining, he was guilty.

That is not to say the alleged perpetrator wasn’t guilty if he wasn’t punished, but mere accusations are less conclusive indicators of guilt than actual punishment. And yes, lack of punishment can also indicate how powerful the alleged perpetrator was when the allegations surfaced.

Here’s an alphabetical list of the most famous American alleged perpetrators of unwanted sexual advances:

Roger Ailes, Woody Allen, Mario Batali, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, Louis C.K., John Conyers, Jr., P. Diddy, Jeffrey Epstein, Mark Foley, Al Franken, Matt Gaetz, Dennis Hastert, Michael Jackson, Brett Kavanaugh, R. Kelly, Matt Lauer, Roy Moore, Larry Nassar, Billy O’Reilly, Bob Packwood, Kevin Spacey, Jerry Sandusky, Clarence Thomas, Strom Thurmond, John Tower, Donald Trump, George Tyndall, Mike Tyson, Anthony Weiner, Harvey Weinstein.

In the United States, the causes of sex crimes are of course, complex and fraught with political, cultural and social hysteria.

The ongoing hysteria is more lucrative than prevention. Sex crimes create business for: lawyers, therapists, the media (including social media), the medical industry, the justice system, law enforcement, and politicians. Also, who is still largely in charge of these parties? And what is the gender of all of the alleged perpetrators listed above? Arguably, preventing sex crimes threatens America’s paternalistic society.