Comments by "yop yop" (@yopyop3241) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics" channel.

  1. ^ I can’t tell if this post is brilliant or the height of unintentional comedy.
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  2. Incorrect. 2030. The year he specifies has always been 2030. And he has been specify 2030 for significantly more than ten years now. The date is based on the retirement of the “4” in China’s “4-2-1” demographic structure. By 2030, most of the “4” will be retired.
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  3. Looks like I accidentally cut off the end of what I intended to post. Here’s the continuation. Basically, the Chinese are going through a massive transition, and Xi has completely scuffed their ability to make that transition smoothly. The higher wages right now are transitional. Companies plan to leave soon. With their short time horizon, it is more cost effective to pay a premium to retain or acquire already-proficient experienced workers than to spend money training up newbies. If Xi weren’t such a bumbler, China would be moving up the value chain. Those highly educated Chinese young people would be taking over some of the work where Japan and Korea are lacking youngsters. In turn, that would have kept more high end manufacturing in the region and would have reduced the short term time horizon that is skewing the labor cost numbers.
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  4. Global warming vs Kara Sea ice cover. Global warming vs roads and pipelines grounded on permafrost. It won’t be long before the Scandinavian population centers have better, more reliable access to northwest Siberia than the main ethnic Russian population centers do. What’s in northwest Siberia? Russia’s main oil and gas fields.
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  5. Bases and allies. Global reach requires a global footprint. The US has 800+ overseas military bases around the world. China has 2. The US acquired the core of its network by having the only navy to survive WW2 and has been able to build on that core because other countries trust the USA. China has no hope in either of those areas. When the US steps back, China is not going to have the chance to step up. It will be countries that have access to the US’s base network like Japan, the UK, Australia, etc. that will. China whines about US meddling. We’ll see how China enjoys needing unanimous assent from a committee of US allies instead.
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  6. The US isn’t going to abandon its global footprint. But it makes a difference if those forces are used to keep the peace vs wreck stuff that the US wants wrecked.
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  7. I bet he doesn’t think it really matters all that much in the long run….
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  8.  @stofjes4204  If China stays peaceful, those overseas assets will provide income to help them try to survive. If China tries to pull an Ukraine, those overseas assets will be seized. Same as Russia’s overseas assets.
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  9. Major economic problems incoming. Real estate and demographic bubbles popping. Trade restrictions going up everywhere— which countries have tariffs under 50% on Chinese EVs these days? Economic problems lead to unrest.
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  10.  @user10u7  Check Xi’s recent speech. He warns the Party to prepare for it.
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  11. Zeihan predicts that East Asia will devolve into decades of war. It’ll be war where Japan, Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, etc. remain connected to the global resources necessary to remain industrialized while China will be cut off, but Chinese desperation will drive them to try over and over and over anyway. He predicts similar devolution in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
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  12.  @joem0088  If there is a new Tanker War, can China maintain enough ship presence in the Gulf to ensure that oil can get out in volume? If India starts up a Chinese-style maritime militia that targets Chinese oil shipments, can China do anything to stop them?
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  13. China has more ships. US has more combat capability. Much more.
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  14. Zeihan has always pegged China’s “sell by date” at 2030. You can paper over the problems with debt for a while, but eventually the problems get too big for that to work anymore. China’s problems get too big between now and when the last Chinese Baby Boomers hit retirement age in 2030. It’s going to get asymptotically much, much worse in China over the next few years.
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  15. Much of this is about expectations. Many countries today have had two generations of below replacement rate births. Young couples in those countries mostly don’t even want more than one or two kids. In contrast, there are some countries where the birth rate has fallen off more recently. In the US, for example, the fertility rate was above replacement as recently as 2008, iirc. Young couples in the US remember having siblings and want that for their families as long as economic distress doesn’t hold them back. In countries like Russia, you need to improve the economy and change people’s expectations. In countries like the US, you only need to improve the economy; the expectations are already in place.
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  16.  @billywhite1403  Japan going on expeditions for oil. In the 20th century, the expeditions were to SE Asia. In the 21st century, the expeditions will be to the Persian Gulf and probably closer to home and in the other direction to Sakhalin. At least this time the Japanese probably won’t need to go on expeditions for food, coal, and iron ore, not with the US and Australia as close allies. That should allow the Koreans to breathe easier….
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  17. We are already seeing cracks in the Chinese system (deflation, housing developers going bust, local governments unable to pay government workers’ salaries, etc.), and this has been just the very first year of China’s Boomers turning 60. They’re still on the easiest difficulty level. It’s going to get a LOT harder over the next five years or so.
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  18.  @JonySmith-bb4gx  Population decline in other countries is a big issue. But China’s population decline is going to be faster than anyone else’s. You simply don’t get a faster decline in the birth rate than you get when an authoritarian government imposes a draconian One Child Policy. In addition, China has huge bubbles in real estate and finance. Those bubbles are intertwined with their demographic crisis. So China is going to face a triple crash— demographic, real estate, and finance. Other countries are only facing one crash, maybe two. USA had two financial crises… and had the sense to deal with them before the demographic challenge of the Baby Boomers retiring needed to be dealt with. China lacked that sense. China did not have a One Child Policy between 1963 and 1970. The One Child Policy was imposed in 1980. (The “Later, Longer, Fewer” policies, sometimes referred to as China’s “Two Child Policy,” were in place from 1970-1980.) Yes, other countries experienced birth rate decline. But not as bad as China. Those other countries’ declines are another problem for China, btw. That’s a longish explanation though. China is nowhere close to self sufficient. Are you kidding me? China requires massive imports of food, energy, fertilizers, metal ores, etc., etc. Almost everything.
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  19. Peak bubble is just-before-collapse bubble.
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  20. The coastal cities from Shanghai to Hong Kong are the most food insecure parts of China. The starvation that will be coming to China will hit those cities first and hardest. Their disproportionate suffering may trigger them to secede in order to forge connections to outsiders who can provide food. Impossible to know what the exact outcome will be: gutted by starvation, secession, or some combination of the two.
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  21. 2030. Zeihan’s prediction has always been for 2030. If your attention span doesn’t go out that far, he has had a prediction for deflation in China by the end of 2024. That one is looking pretty likely to be another bull’s eye.
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  22.  @tilhon  Keep in mind that the PRC government is not organized the same way as we do it in the West. In the PRC, the popular parts of government are monopolized by the national government while the unpopular parts are all pushed onto the local authorities. The national government is responsible for the military, the space program, their equivalent of the National Institutes of Health, etc. The local governments get stuck with the duties of the IRS, enforcing EPA regulations, etc. And the local governments are almost always desperate for funds, because the national government gets its funds by taking money from the local governments and has little in the way of checks or balances. The end result of this national vs local government architecture is that the Chinese populace loves the national government but absolutely loathes their local government. How stable is the system as a whole? Impossible to say, but it’s definitely a mistake to focus on the popularity of the national government without also considering the unpopularity of the local governments.
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  23. Lol. The prediction is for a globe-spanning collapse. I guess no one is allowed to comment unless they speak every language on Earth. Nah. He’s right to point out that the world is incredibly fragile now. Retirement crises everywhere. War in Ukraine and Israel and the Caucuses. The difficulty of defending against drone attacks. China’s real estate and finance bubbles. General discord in the US and Europe. Biggest protests in Iran since the fall of the Shah. American withdrawal of forces from the Middle East and American isolationism in general. Inflation in the advanced democracies. Deflation in China. And if the global system breaks, he’s right that China is certain to suffer more than anyone. Longest, most at-risk logistical lifelines on the planet.
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  24. Recession on top of everything else: ongoing real estate collapse, incredibly brittle banking sector, retirement crisis, collapse in international reputation which is spawning protective tariffs, loss of access to tech, and a regional arms race. Also: You have not lived through economic collapse. Ukraine’s economy is being propped up with outside aid. China will not have that kind of economic support. As bad as it is in Ukraine, you should be thankful that you are not facing the sort of collapse that is coming for China. China’s collapse is probably coming before the war in Ukraine is resolved.
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  25. In the past, instead of heading to Israel, that carrier would have been headed towards the Gulf and preparing to run sorties into Iran….
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  26. Zeihan thought that the Europeans would shut down Russian exports through the Baltic Sea and that the Ukrainians would shut down Russian exports through Ukraine and the Black Sea. Those were reasonable assumptions. The fact that he got it wrong is probably an indication that the Europeans are very, very happy with how the war is playing out. Russian oil being allowed to continue to flow is an indication that the Europeans don’t feel threatened at all.
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  27. Not for China. In the global robotics sector, almost half of the value-added comes from Japan, Germany is in second place with around 10%, then there is a glut of countries at around 2% that includes the US, the Netherlands, Italy, Korea, Taiwan, Canada, France, and the UK. China is below 1%. Factor in population size, and you can see how inadequate China’s position in robotics is. Robotics might be enough for Japan and maybe some wealthy micro nations like Singapore, but it won’t be anywhere close to enough for China. AI isn’t there yet. Training current AIs is extremely labor intensive. Unless we have a huge unexpected breakthrough, AI isn’t going to save anyone. It will help a bit around the margins, but it isn’t a game changer.
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  28. Zeihan is predicting a far greater loss than a mere 200 million in China. He is predicting the loss of billions around the world with China getting hit harder than anyone else because China happens to have the longest, most at-risk trade lifelines on the planet.
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  29.  @bsmithhammer The casino doesn’t win every time, but they win enough to be ridiculously profitable. Zeihan’s predictions are like the casino’s win percentage. The haters pointing out his misses are completely missing the point.
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  30.  @ammoniawilder4451 ”I live in the hottest and most humid climate in America.” Lol. Here’s what Hong Kong is like. Start with, say, the climate of New Orleans. Now shift the city south to nearly the latitude of Miami. Now shift is south by that same amount again. Now, instead of the flat terrain that you have around New Orleans, let’s surround the city with hills to still the air (like what happens to Los Angeles and contributes to LA’s infamous smog). Finally, the Pearl River Delta region that Hong Kong is just one part of covers an area almost twice the size of the state of Maryland while hosting a population of 85 million people (more than one quarter of the entire US population in a single extended integrated urban region). That much crowded city— let’s amp up the urban heat island effect accordingly. Voila! Welcome to Hong Kong! Edit to add: And mega cities like Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, and Singapore are still further south….
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  31. Zeihan has always put China’s “collapsed by” date at 2030. The date is set by China’s demographics. Famine from 1958-1961 was followed by giant baby boom from 1963-1970. (1970 is when birth restrictions started to be imposed.) Declining health forces manual laborers to retire at age 60 on average. Sixty years after 1963 is 2023; sixty years after 1970 is 2030. China’s giant cadre of Boomers have just started to retire; they will almost all be retired by 2030. With the One Child Policy stunting the younger generations, China by 2030 will be a giant old folks home. The few young people who exist will mostly all be forced to devote their lives to elder care. Until societal collapse comes, anyway.
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  32. China’s debt situation is undoubtedly much worse than the USA’s. It’s just harder to see because the Chinese system is non-transparent.
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  33. US GDP growth in the last couple of years has been spearheaded by increased factory construction. It is easy to see how the US economy can benefit from more manufacturing. Good match with the US’s plentiful labor, cheapest-in-the-world energy, and abundant raw resources. In contrast, China’s GDP growth has been spearheaded by unneeded real estate and infrastructure spending, even as the Chinese population is receding. There is no plausible case to be made for that GDP growth to be productive.
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  34. US factory construction doubled from May 2022 to April 2023 (the latest data we have) to reach levels not seen since WW2. In the last twelve months, imports from China are down by 20%.
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  35.  pa_2600  Japan’s reputation is rising rapidly in Korea. The dyed-in-the-wool anti-Japan people are dying out, and younger Koreans have much more favorable opinions of Japan.
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  36. The JMSDF is highly competent, and most of the world has allowed their navies to wither away to almost nothing. But the key reason the JMSDF is head and shoulders above everyone except the US is the “tyranny of distance.” Japan is a close, trusted US ally and is therefore free to operate out of US military bases. In a conflict with any of the likely opponents, the fight will happen in a location where Japan has overwhelmingly superior logistics thanks to the US’s global network of 700+ overseas military bases. No one else comes anywhere close to that number. The UK and France probably have a dozen or so each. No one else has more than a bare handful. China has only one, same as Japan, and those bases are just a few miles apart with Japan allowed to have sea, air, and land forces vs China being restricted to sea only. In any conflict, China’s sole overseas foothold will probably go “poof”within minutes.
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  37.  pa_2600  What do your kids think about Japan? Because “younger” referred to Millennials and especially GenZ, not GenX. Polling in Korea shows much higher estimation for Japan among people in their teens and twenties.
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  38.  pa_2600  Young Koreans know what the Japanese did to Korea in the first half of the twentieth century. But they also know that current Japanese society is very, very different from what it was back then. The current Japanese are not their great grandparents.
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  39. That’s what almost everyone for all of human history has said just before their asset bubbles popped.
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  40.  @robbycook4298 Your position fits with how the US would operate if the voting public were divided or indifferent. But it seems to me that there is a growing bipartisan consensus for isolationism. 99 times out of 100, the politicians follow along with public opinion in these sorts of situations.
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  41.  @Skunk106  Might be slow for now, but once the system cracks, it will happen all at once.
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  42. You think those carriers are there to protect freedom of navigation? To defend the global commons? I don’t. I think those carriers are there because Hamas just killed and captured dozens of Americans. Those carriers are there solely to protect American interests, not global ones. That’s entirely in line with what Zeihan has been saying. The US military is shifting from defending the commons to only working for strict American interests.
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  43. Except that when they do the actual experiments with CO2 enhanced greenhouses, it turns out that it doesn’t work that way.
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  44.  @weisthor0815  In many cases, they have full citizenship. They can’t be kicked out. Immigrants also invariably make up a disproportionate fraction of military personnel, so using the regular military won’t be effective either. Your best “hope” is probably to overthrow democracy and go full fascist or something equivalent. If you are not prepared to stoop to that level, your only choices are integration or displacement.
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  45. US factory construction doubled from May 2022 to April 2023, and the curve shows no indications of bending back down to the baseline. We are now at levels not seen since WW2. That’s not as impressive as one might first imagine, because the US economy is so much bigger than it was back then. There’s plenty of potential for that curve to climb higher, and the current trend line indicates that that is exactly what is happening. (Edit to note that April 2023 is the latest data available, I believe.)
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  46. By 2030. Their retirement crisis is going to shift them from tons of workers vs hardly any non-workers that need to be supported to the opposite.
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  47. I think Peter would recommend: 1. Move to Texas or a nearby-to-Texas state, 2. Find a job with a manufacturing company, preferably one in an energy-intensive industry, and 3. Learn Spanish.
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  48. Only a small fraction of the value-added that is embodied in the stuff loaded onto a ship from China to the US is from China. The Chinese have nearly cornered the market on final assembly, but that’s the easiest thing there is to replace. Just reroute the complex, high value-added intermediate manufactured components that were made in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, Germany, etc. to some alternative final assembly location. In many cases, it only takes a matter of a few minutes to train up a new worker for that new final assembly factory. It takes time to work out the logistics, but companies have long known about China’s upcoming (in progress) demographic implosion, so they already have plans in motion to relocate the final assembly operations that have been China’s forte. It’ll be fine. Definitely less disruptive than the covid supply chain snafus, where we got completely blindsided. It won’t be entirely painless, but if you were able to survive the covid toilet paper apocalypse, this will be a comparative walk in the park.
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  49.  @georgehenderson7783  The US government is currently paying a NEGATIVE real interest rate on its debt. For the moment at least, the bigger the debt, the better off the USA is. Obviously, the interest rate vs inflation rate situation can and will change sooner or later, so there is a good argument for paying down the US debt at least somewhat. But it’s definitely a weird time for internet commenters to be focusing in on US debt. At the moment, it’s the rest of the world’s debt that is problematic. China deserves special mention, because Chinese local government income streams have dried up, and China’s current condition of deflation is only exacerbating their debt problems. Again, obviously things could change, but the current environment is very favorable to the US and very unfavorable for most of the rest of the world with China as a notable standout for suffering.
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  50. I was just speculating about this topic the other day. The combination of the US’s cheap energy with Japan’s expertise in steel production and robotics should be a match made in heaven. Kind of like how Toyota became the biggest US car manufacturer. Next, we need to do the same thing with shipbuilding. And while AI controlled self-driving cars still seem to be a ways off, maybe AI controlled self-steering ships are doable. Maybe even without needing those high end microchips that are at risk? And voila! Ships built in America and “captained and crewed” by American AI. Jones Act neutered. Another stray thought: What would AI steered ships mean for Zeihan’s prediction of a breakdown in global maritime trade? Much harder to take control over such a vessel. And no crew to hold for ransom.
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