The decline and Fall of the West...

The decline and Fall of the West...

A Guest Post from MH 24AUG23

A friend who escaped iron curtain Czechoslovakia and set up a successful technology business in Melbourne is a close observer of western decay. He offers this insight... 

" ... India will take a long time to rise, it has many internal problems. They can now land on the moon, but most of their population lives in poverty, their cities are dirty, and the Indian mindset is difficult to do business with. China is a totally different story, demonstrably lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, building futuristic cities with amazing infrastructure, leading in many technological and scientific fields, constructing space stations. 

Exporting marvellous infrastructure to the world that we in the West no longer know how to build. The right way for the West to react to China would be embracing fair competition and lifting our own game. 

Unfortunately much of the West is too lazy for that and the US is no longer the leading beacon of (flawed) democracy we used to know and love. It is now a failing plutocracy almost at a war with itself. It has lost much of its former “soft power” due to its export of loonie ideologies, bizarre culture wars, failed armed conflicts and unsuccessful attempts at regime changes of other nations. 

China doesn’t have this baggage. Their primary goal is to dominate through business. Some media still call China “communist”, but it's a misnomer. 

Much of Chinese industry is privately owned and free market capitalism reigns in the country. Basically, the Chinese managed An incredible sleight of hand trick, having co-opted their former ideological enemy, free-market capitalism, as their primary economic tool. 

The Chinese Communist Party is now communist in the name only. It rules through a system of technocratic meritocracy similar to that of Singapore - arguably the most successful autocracy the world has ever had.

While China has admittedly lost much of the world’s sympathy recently, mainly due to Covid, it is slowly coming back on track because everyone can see how they are advancing fast, building great modern and safe cities and infrastructure, while American cities are crumbling and infested with crime and violence. If handled properly, this new competition between the two superpowers could be a great thing. 

Frankly, I am less worried about the Chinese than the Americans. The American instinctive reaction to rising China seems to be that of destructive propaganda and sabotage rather than reinventing itself, lifting its game and embracing competition and cooperation. For me, with my anti-communist past, it’s frustrating for me to see how far the pendulum of history has swung to the opposite direction. We are now in a real danger of becoming the bad guys...

And oh, the Chinese are not interested in obliterating the Western culture. They are in fact embracing it, as a visit to any major modern Chinese city reveals. Sadly, and paradoxically, the same can not be said about some Western cities!

Most of the CCP top brass are engineers (Xi himself is a chemical engineer). Most of the US leadership are lawyers. What does it tell you...?

That the Chinese will build the future while the Americans will keep arguing about it. "