On the first episode of a new podcast, The Realignment, the hosts interview J. D. Vance. It was an interesting conversation, during the course of which Vance expressed a great deal of alarmism about the rise of China as a world power. He indicated that hear feared China is intent on world domination. Vance’s mentor, Peter Thiel, is also a China-skeptic.
I am of two minds on this. On the one hand, Thiel and Vance are expressing a reasonable view of the reality that the coming age of instability is going to be driven by the emergence of a rival superpower to the United States of America.* In Ian Morris’ War! What Is It Good For? he argues that hyper-powers and “world police” impose order and peace, which is good for everyone. This was also the logic, in part, of the post-war maintenance of American military forces (as opposed to our customary drawdown and demobilization). American military power allowed for Germany and Japan to flourish as economic powers.
The rise of Chinese economic and military power in the 21st-century at some level of parity with the United States of America will destabilize certain established relationships between and across nations. China doesn’t even have to match the United States, the Soviet Union in the 20th-century showed all one needs is some level of parity to introduce destabilization into many regions of the world, as kleptocrats can play the great powers against each other.
But it wasn’t always this way. In the 2000s Chimerica was a force for global development, and the USA and China operated as two legs of an engine that drove the world economy. If you read Thomas Friedman and the boosters of globalization you would smile at the thought of win-win dynamics, and the vast markets that were going to emerge for American products.
It hasn’t worked out that way. But, despite Vance and Thiel’s criticisms, part of me has to admit that the rise of Chinese prosperity is one of the greatest and most positive things that has occurred in the history of the world. The decline of grinding poverty to a great extent is the rise of the Chinese economy, driven by the industry and ingenuity of its people, despite its authoritarian government and perverse regnant Communist ideology. If I was Chinese, I would surely be proud about the rise of my nation, and my people, from the horrible shocks of the 20th-century, from the de facto colonization of the early decades to the self-inflicted horror of Maoist Communism.
So the question presents itself: is there any scenario where a China which takes its rightful place in the sun does not threaten the American order? The most unrealistic boosters of the pre-2008 consensus made the argument that economic integration would make it so that ties of common interest and affinity would knit together China and the liberal democratic world. Liberalization the economic sphere would lead to liberalization in the political sphere.
That has not happened. And, it does not seem to be likely to happen in the near future. Chinese economic output is converging with the West (some urban regions are already part of the developed world), but its social and political culture is not doing so at all. Arguably it is less amenable to liberal democratic norms today than it was a generation ago.
As an empirical matter we, Americans, are going to have to deal with the rise of the dragon. I do think that Vance presented in the podcast an excessively apocalyptic view. I do not believe that the Chinese political class has ambitions of world domination. I believe it has ambitions of a level of hegemony at least comparable to that of America, which is a great deal of power. Nor do I believe that the Chinese consumer, who are threatened by demographic headwinds, are willing to subsidize the sort of quasi-imperium that the American public has paid for for the past 70+ years in the form of bases the world over.
When it comes to economics and military concerns I don’t have simple answers. But I do have some thoughts about culture. Today, in the midst of its economic revival, the average citizen of mainland China is quite self-interested and selfish. This will not always be so, as post-material concerns will arise. Chinese society, the Chinese state, has traditionally rested on a system of political and social ethics which is entirely intelligible and civilized to the non-Chinese mind. Concepts such as “good-heartedness” and “rites” are not difficult to understand in regards to why they might be useful to the maintenance of a proper society and individual flourishing.
Today in the West there is a tendency to exalt individual self-actualization and self-cultivation above all. It is an atomistic and ad hoc ideology. Though somewhat marginal, it may become less so over time. Many Americans are not excited about denouncing all the “olds” at the behest of our own red guards. Though I understand in geopolitical terms Vance and Thiel’s alarm, when it comes to culture I have to admit that I do hope Chinese assertiveness may allow our global civilization to stand athwart history just a bit, and make some room for the verities of yore.
* It is also not irrelevant that I broadly share Thiel and Vance’s political sympathies in the American context.
Razib, wouldn’t political liberalization in China increase the possibilities of clashes on an international scale? (That it would reduce it is a flawed Bushian theory, according to which democracies hold hands and sing kumbaya and don’t fight with each other.)
If history is a guide to future behavior, the British public arguably grew more imperialistic as their politics liberalized. That imperialism was started and led not by the British state but by independent actors (like the East India Company) that nevertheless had cover from the state for all their actions and could be bailed out. Surely, if Chinese state power gives way to Chinese corporate power, and the corporates gain semi-colonial footholds in less powerful countries, something similar may brew up in China?
Razib, wouldn’t political liberalization in China increase the possibilities of clashes on an international scale? (
well. i think if it became more of popular democracy, then yeah. though ‘liberalism’ is somewhat orthogonal to that.
the British public arguably grew more imperialistic as their politics liberalized.
again, i think you mean the spread of popular democracy and widening suffrage. britain was liberal far earlier than it was democratic.
(hong kong is the exemplar of nondemocratic liberalism under the british)
If there is one thing that gives me hope it is that China hasn’t done anything stupid or engaged in any kind of military conflict despite consciousness of their rising wealth and power.
This is rather tangential, and sorry if I sound like a broken record, but I think almost all ratios, like child mortality, should be graphed on a log scale.
The linear graph makes it look like the world is just 20 years behind China, the log graph not so much. Extrapolation is complicated by China’s 10 year pause. Does that show up in other health statistics?
Sorry for the confusion, I did mean popular democracy. By liberalization, I meant the spread of political power and agency from a narrow oligarchy (whether liberal or not) to the masses.
It needs to be pointed out that we probably have never seen a more peaceful relationship between a rising superpower and the dominant superpower than we have over the last twenty years between China and the United States. I’m not even sure that the relationship between Great Britain and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was better. And in that case, the U.S. and Great Britain shared many political and cultural ideals, which is certainly not true today of China and the U.S.
The U.S. business and political elites have not only acquiesced in China’s rise over the last two decades, but actively helped it. American policymakers assisted China in entering the global trade and financial system. U.S. political rhetoric against China has certainly been muted compared to that rhetoric used against Russia, despite the fact that China is inarguably a far more formidable opponent than Putin’s Russia. And sweetheart business deals for U.S. firms wanting access in China, which usually don’t pan out quite like the U.S. corporations hoped for, hasn’t provoked the backlash that’s probably deserved.
Will that change? I hope so. China will continue to grow more powerful and wealthy, with or without American help. So the U.S. political and business elites need to be more realistic about how they approach the relationship.
In fact, I would say that there has been less pushback in the U.S. against China’s rise over the last two decades than there was over Japan’s economic rise in the nineteen-eighties and early nineteen-nineties.
Which is very odd when you think about it. Japan is much smaller than China. It shares many of our political ideals and was part of our military alliance against the USSR. And the Japanese economy was never that close to overtaking the U.S. economy in size and scope, even if Japan was capable of excellence in manufacturing that China has not demonstrated yet.
Look at a public intellectual like James Fallows, who is best known for his long relationship at The Atlantic Monthly. Fallows spent a lot of the late eighties and early nineties worrying about Japan. He was associated with that group of policymakers (Clyde Prestowitz) and writers (George Friedman, Michael Crichton) who harped on the notion that Japan was taking American’s place. I read his book Looking at the Sun, which sought to show that Japan was rebuilding the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere
So you would think Fallows would be even more wary of a larger East Asian nation with a despotic political system and more capable military power than the Japan of the 1980s advancing to the top of the world economy. But for the most part that’s not been true. Fallows has been fairly blasé about it.
The rise of Japan happened after Vietnam and the stagflation era of the 70s when the US was short on confidence and was seeing Japanese manufacturers outcompete it. Plus this was a country the US had dropped two atomic bombs on after Pearl Harbour. After Japan fading and a few solid decades of services-driven economic growth, the US is a bit more relaxed.
Ali,
You’re correct that the economic rise of Japan began to be noticed in the late sixties and early seventies, but the overblown rhetoric against Japan did not get ramped up until the eighties and nineties, well after Vietnam and the Stagflation Era.
Look at when the pop books against Japan began to come out. The James Fallows’ book I mentioned in an earlier post, for example, was published in 1994, which with the benefit of hindsight we can now say is a couple years into the country’s relative economic decline. James Meredith’s ridiculous book The Coming War Against Japan was published in 1995. Michael Crichton’s novel Rising Sun was published in 1992, and the film came out the following year.
Even Clyde Prestowitz’s book Trading Places: How We Allowed Japan to Take the Lead and David Halberstam’s history of Ford and Nissan Motors, The Reckoning, were published in 1988 and 1986, respectively. Those two books are the earliest popular accounts I can remember. Meanwhile, the most popular scholarly account I can remember – Ezra Vogel’s Japan As Number One: Lessons for America – was published in 1979.
I think the better explanation is that the U.S. was somewhat more nationalist back in the 1980s and early 1990s than it is today. Notice how even the lefties (Fallows, Halberstam) were publishing books protective of U.S. economic interests and American workers. Can you imagine that today? When you add in the typical lag time before journalists and other pop writers begin to notice serious trends – like the economic rise of Japan and its possible effect on U.S. jobs – you get at least a decade or two delay before the popular books on Japan’s rise made it out to the public.
Re; late 19th century imperialism, Britain and European allies/adversaries, and whether suffrage and broadening democratic participation was a driver of any of this, I suspect you’d understand it better through analysis of power balance between countries than ‘popular spirits’ being more bellicose than smooth, cautious and worldly elites. It’s doesn’t seem as if Britain were more bellicose or expansionist than European autocracies of the 19th c, especially for similar levels of actual advantage.
It seems like Europeans both became more imbalanced against the world (allowing overseas adventures and errors to be relatively inexpensive) and that as others caught up to Britain in industrial terms, the internal balance of power in Europe became more unstable. If a large dynamic does predict.
I am not sure elites are generally less bellicose than “the people”. Certainly seems they haven’t been in the very early 21st century United States and Britain. A matter for historians? Talking in a less openly nationalistic or pro-military way doesn’t seem to have had that that much to do in the near term with enthusiasm for actually justifying conflicts.
Pincher,
There was also the LA riots, Japanese companies like Sony buying iconic US assets like movie studios and Rockefeller Plaza and the early 90s recession. Plus after the Cold War you got the impression the US commentariat was looking for the next threat. That role was fulfilled by Islamic terrorism.
At bottom the only time the US was in open conflict with China was during the Korean war and that does not register much in public memory. Nixon’s detente in 1972 also meant the US stopped thinking of China as an antagonistic rival. As you say there was a strongly nationalistic response to Japan. You don’t go to war against someone for four years without that colouring future attitudes.
Ali,
But one could point to many of the same things today with China, and yet not even a small segment of the U.S. political and intellectual elite is engaged in hating on or worrying about China to the same degree we saw with Japan. (That may be changing.)
I would argue there is a lot more to worry about with China today than there was with Japan in 1990. A lot more.
I mean, the small recession you mention that took place in the early 1990s lasted less than nine months and the unemployment rate topped out at around 7.8 percent. And that was the only U.S. recession between 1982 and 2001. Meanwhile, Japan lost the entire decade – and some people have argued has lost the last *two* decades to economic stagnation.
Japan might have overpaid for the Pebble Beach Golf Course in 1990, but I think it’s far more significant that the Chinese have been purchasing a lot of California residential real estate over the last decade, driving up prices all over the state.
So many of the same things you list about Japan circa 1990 are taking place today with China. And that doesn’t even bring us to the minor military confrontations with the PLA that were completely lacking with Japan in the 1990s.
@ Pincher Martin
“the Chinese have been purchasing a lot of California residential real estate over the last decade, driving up prices all over the state.”
Isn’t that mostly private investment by China’s nouveau riche upper-class? Are you saying the Chinese government itself might have some sort of involvement in it? Chinese real estate acquisitions seems to be a problem with all the Anglo countries around the Pacific – the US, Canada (Vancouver), Australia, and New Zealand.
Mick,
No, the purchases are private (as far as I know), but so were the Japanese purchases of high-profile U.S. real estate in the 1980s and 1990s.
When talking about American public sentiment toward foreigners, I don’t think it matters all that much what entity outside of America buys the real estate. The Chinese U.S. residential real estate purchases have a bigger effect on the lives of more Americans than did the Japanese purchases of Pebble Beach and the Rockefeller Center. But there’s been less pushback about it.
“a China which takes its rightful place in the sun”
Rightful? Just because you are big and you are rich does not mean you are rightful.
I think I have cited the Thucydides Trap in these pages before.
I think part of why there was more elite concern about Japan than there has been with China is that China’s economic rise has been accompanied by American businesses making a *lot* of money outsourcing manufacturing to China. From the perspective of upper middle class Americans, the rise of China has been win-win.
In contrast, by the 1990’s, no one was getting rich on outsourcing manufacturing to Japan. Japanese economic development didn’t *directly* contribute to the success of US businesses in the same way.
Taeyoung,
That’s a reasonable explanation, but it reduces everything down to the commercial interests of a few. What about the intellectual elites who look primarily at U.S. strategic and military issues? What about the American political elites who often target the “commercial interests of the few” when it suits their interests? So your explanation is, to me, only partially correct. Something else is also at work.
Look at the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Romney declared Russia to be the top strategic threat to the United States. The Democrats laughed. Fast forward four years and the Democrats are echoing Romney’s claim. This debate comes in the context of a Russian economy and population that are both about one-tenth the size of China’s. And whatever military advantages Russia still has over China could probably be overcome in a matter of a few years if the PRC’s leadership were ever to decide to focus its energies in that direction rather than on economic development. But the mainstream debate on geopolitics during the six years before Trump’s election focused far more energy on the much weaker Russia than on the far more formidable China.
Meanwhile, Trump – a lone wandering soul when it comes to GOP elites and their ideas about the world – has focused on China to a degree no major candidate in either party ever has. But Trump’s ideas about the world are too inchoate and his political approach too instinctual to ever come up with a coherent strategy for China. Trump also has few followers in the GOP elite. Those intellectual and political elites still in the party tolerate him more than emulate him.
By the way, since Razib just posted a thread on “Stuff I was wrong about,” it’s worth mentioning that in the battle between the economists and the generic public intellectuals over Japan’s importance in the late eighties and early nineties, the economists were proven correct and the public intellectuals wrong. Japan hadn’t invented a new form of capitalism that the rest of the world must emulate. Japan hadn’t, as the joke went, won the Cold War.
Most of the public intellectuals stayed on the Japan train until the mid-nineteen nineties, but by the end of the decade, with Japan in a multi-year slump that would later be called “The Lost Decade,” the debate was over.
Regarding Japan in the 80s, I think there was a sense (as someone mentioned) that Japan had invented a new form of capitalism, a new form of economic and more importantly social organization, that would be very difficult for Western nations to copy for cultural reasons. And so it would leave the West behind, like the West had earlier left the rest of the world behind.
If you’ve been to Japan and seen the work ethic in Japan, what is amazing is that the per capita income is now lower there than in the USA, not that it got as high as it did.
Also, Japanese total GDP (not per capita) peaked at about 75% of USA level in the mid-90s. Mostly because everything was so expensive there. Now it’s nearer 30% of US levels (I think because Asian countries eat each other, so to speak).
China until the last few years has been viewed in America and the West as a just a really big developing country. A giant version of Malaysia or something. So it wasn’t seen as a threat except to jobs that would have been outsourced anyway. Now belatedly it’s seen as a great power threat. There’s a realization that China is following in the footsteps of S Korea, and a 25 times larger S Korea will really be something.
Personally I think it will stall out soon enough because of its demographic profile. As it ages. As Japan did a long time ago, and as S Korea is now. It will lose its vitality.
And the recent focus on Russia is I think partly historic (they are our long-standing enemy), and also because it’s a country that is strong enough to set up as a foe, but not strong enough to be perceived as having a serious chance of winning. China is a little too scary, with their 4X population vs America.
there was a lot of talk about how japanese invested in basic science, did industrial policy, and thought in the long-term.
There was something almost science fiction about Japan in the late 80s and into the early 90s. I heard the Borg in Star Trek the next generation was modeled on them. They were attacking us from above, not from below. And who knows what could have happened if they didn’t get knee-capped by Korea and Taiwan and Silicon Valley.
It was a bubble but the land occupied by the imperial palace in Tokyo (smaller than Central Park in NY) had an estimated value greater than the entire state of California in 1989. Wake me up when that happens in Beijing.
It wasn’t only stuff like industrial policy that you could conceivably copy easily enough. It was stuff that was seen as fundamentally cultural, and impossible for the West to copy. I’m very familiar with Japan, and can say that it seemed at least plausible at the time.
@Mick – In relation to Australia, no. There was a strong perception that the real estate bubble (which has since been slowly deflating) was being driven by investment by rich Mainland Chinese, but that has been disproven by data. In reality it was driven by rampant property speculation by domestic investors combined with a quirk in Australian taxation law called ‘negative gearing’, whereby if you buy a property then make an annual loss on it in interest payments and maintenance costs, you can claim that loss as a tax deduction. In effect it means that other taxpayers are subsidising your property holdings. There has been talk of removing it, but the fear is that it will spark a catastrophic collapse in property prices, leaving large numbers of people in negative equity. There are already quite a few, and Australians have among the highest individual debt levels in the world, along with Canada and Switzerland, weirdly. (To give you some idea, the guy living next door to my mother, who puts up fences for a living, at one point owned 10 houses, and he was not unusual.)
There is also panic talk in Australia about Chinese companies buying up large numbers of farms and mines, but again it is not supported by data. In reality the biggest foreign investors in Australian agriculture and mining are from the UK and the USA. China comes well down the list in terms of total investment.
Probably the most genuine concern is that the rights to operate the port of Darwin, a city on Australia’s northern coast closest to SE Asia, were sold to a Chinese company. In retrospect that looks like a very stupid mistake (and there is talk that the federal government should buy back the port), particularly as the US now wants to establish a military port at Darwin as a base for Marine forces to help counter Chinese expansion into the south-western Pacific. But the US military don’t seem too bothered by it, saying they will just build a separate military facility.
All of this talk should probably be seen in the historical context that Anglo-Australians have always had a hatred and mistrust of Chinese that date back to the 19th Century gold rushes, when large numbers of illegal Chinese miners poured into the country, plus the Yellow Peril scares of the early 20th Century. The White Australia Policy was only finally dismantled in the 1970s. So, with the rise of wealthy Chinese with a lot of money that they want to shift out of China, whenever there is a problem it automatically gets blamed on the Chinese. Curiously, given the experience of WWII, the same dynamic was not operating at all when Japanese investors were buying up everything in the 1980s.
China’s continued rise is far from assured. There are crossing currents. The one-child policy means many mothers with only one son. Any large military action will be hotly contested internally. As these sons age, they themselves will lose enthusiasm for military action. 30-year-olds are harder to convince to fight than 18-year-olds.
Political instability has been held down, but given rural-urban prosperity gaps and inevitable economic cycles, we could see some serious troubles. How long has China been without a recession? It wouldn’t take much of one to put a heavy squeeze on many debt-heavy companies. Can the government tolerate an extended period of low tax revenue?
I lived in Japan through the 1990s and into the 2000s. By the time I had been there a year I was questioning the narrative that Japan was surpassing the US. I recall when the Rockefeller Center was bought, and also when it was sold back to the original owner at a considerable discount. China may beat the odds, but I’ll be surprised.
@Bulbul – It’s an academic question, but what do you reckon the Forbidden City is worth? When my wife and I went there in 1982, we virtually had the place to ourselves because in those days locals were banned from entry, and it took us more than half a day to walk from one end to the other, although we were obviously stopping to look at lots of stuff on the way (although the buildings are largely empty because most of the contents were taken to Taiwan by the Kuomintang when they evacuated from the Mainland – we had to go to Taipei to see them, and they are also on a massive scale).
Ever been to Tienanmen Square? It’s vast, almost unimaginably big. First time I stood on one side of it, the sheer scale of it took my breath away. Again, it’s academic, but in terms of land value, it would be huge.
@Bulbul:
“If you’ve been to Japan and seen the work ethic in Japan, what is amazing is that the per capita income is now lower there than in the USA, not that it got as high as it did.”
Kind of, but not really . . . South Koreans work even harder than Japanese and their GDP per capita is even lower. If anything, what’s striking walking around Tokyo is how much human capital and resources are being poured into clearly low-productivity work. In “broken windows” terms, consumer-facing companies and government agencies clearly spend a lot of time mending windows that aren’t actually broken yet — replacing, cleaning, or repainting facilities that are in better condition than what you get in places like New York or Washington DC. There’s also a lot of people working in service roles that simply don’t exist any more in the US, like all the ladies who line up to bow at you when the department store opens. And there are people who in the US would probably not even be part of the work force who are earning a paycheck — I recall seeing a construction worker who had had a stroke or some kind of partially paralyzing industry who was out working, waiving passersby around a bit of pavement where his colleagues were working. There’s a lot of highly visible low-productivity work in Japan.
But a lot of this is in some sense a form of collective consumption — like having a nice lawn, or nice house, or a nice car, only it’s their shared public spaces. Shopping in, or even just walking around Tokyo is, for me, a much more pleasant experience than shopping at, say, CostCo. These massive, glaring inefficiencies from pouring resources into making things “comfortable” are part of the reason that’s the case.
There’s pressure for greater productivity, to be sure. For example, Family Mart (a convenience store chain) has automated checkout lanes now, although I rarely see anyone using them. And smaller offices have generally replaced their receptionists with automated reception systems. But I think — contrary to the stereotype of Japan as a leader in automation — it’s been more of a struggle to get consumers to forgo the human touch in Japan than it has been in the US.
I’m not sure what the situation is today, as I haven’t looked at the economic stats for a while and I haven’t lived in East Asia for nearly ten years, but the service sector in East Asian countries was always a laggard. Ten people bowing to greet customers when they enter a department store was one of the cliches, but it was more telling that countries like Japan never learned to deploy their massive capital very efficiently. Hong Kong was somewhat of an exception, but even that city’s service sector wasn’t cutting edge in the same way that some of Japan’s manufacturers were cutting edge. It just didn’t lag as far behind.
Really, that’s true all over East Asia. The GDP-produced-per-hour in all the East Asian countries is behind places like Italy and Spain.
Pincher Martin,I did not know the GDP stats. Quite surprising in many cases. Thanks.
This is the sort of thing I read comments here for.
I’m based in NYC so that may explain my attitude, but for every superfluous construction or government worker in Tokyo, I will show you 10 in NYC. And at least in Tokyo they’re polite and pretend to work. It’s not rare to see 30 MTA construction/repair workers standing in a big circle around a repair site on a weekend, with 26 looking at their cellphones and 4 working, albeit slowly.
I agree that with consumption, we are not really comparing like to like when we talk about the Japanese retail experience vs Costco. You get a pleasantness and an excellent customer service that isn’t factored into cross-country comparisons of living standards.
And sure, there is a lot of inefficiency in Japan. But they are genuinely good workers, not only working hard but also often taking pride in doing a good job, as they define it. You would just think they could harness that work ethic to create a very prosperous economy. Instead you have salaries that are half what you’d find on the US coasts. Cost of living is much much lower in Tokyo than NYC though.
Bulbul,
The cost of living might be lower in Tokyo than in NYC, but I wouldn’t say it’s “much much lower.”
I wasn’t making a moral judgment one way or the other. I was just stating a fact that labor productivity in the service sector for the East Asian countries wasn’t – and appears still not to be – very efficient compared to the European countries and the U.S.
I lived in East Asia for more than a decade, and I appreciate the quality of its people. They’re smart and hard-working, and their communities are safe. I like smart, industrious people who are not prone to crime.
But positive traits can on occasion be taken to an extreme. People who value hard work, for example, will sometimes just work for the sake of working – and not because it’s necessary to get a particular job done. I see that sometimes in the United States, but I saw it far more often in East Asia.
Also, in Japan, you have micro-economic events that add up and influence the macro-economy. Their consumer electronics industry just got totally dismantled by the Koreans and other Asians. Plus the iPhone/smartphone which superseded a lot of the little single-use gadgets they used to make. Their auto sector is doing better but you definitely get the sense that even there they lost a lot of mojo to the Germans at the high end and Hyundai at the low end.
All the industrial sectors that made Japan so famous and such a threat in the 1980s are basically gone. And so you have a currency that used to be insanely strong because of those sectors now very weak. Hence Japan going from 75% of American total (nominal) GDP to 30% or whatever it is now.
@martin
I live in NY and am very familiar with Tokyo. I also know a lot of Japanese people here in NY and also in Tokyo. From my sense, cost of living is half there what it is here. Food in restaurants costs half, rents cost less than half, hotel rooms less than half, many services are much cheaper there. The only thing I can think of that is still very expensive in Japan are the taxis.
Not only is the cost of living much more in NY, quality is often abysmal. Most apartments are old, dirty, and often roach infested, despite costing the same deep inside Queens as they would cost in Central Tokyo. Food is not very good even compared to other large American cities, forget about to a perfectionist culture like Japan.
And it’s not like NY is some sort of insignificant outlier. NYC and SF and the other big coastal metros are huge wealth creators. They are what make America the leader that it is in huge, forward looking economic sectors.
Bulbul,
I believe you’re accurately recording your impressions, but when looking at something like the cost of living in two international cities I prefer objective measures that systemically record a wide range of services and needs, some of which fall outside the viewpoint of even an astute observer who is on the ground.
I’ve never seen any statistics which claim the cost of living in Tokyo is half that of New York City. Really, I’ve never seen anything even close to that figure. And these COLA charts for expats who travel the world doing business have been around a long time.
One important thing may be that we are not comparing like to like. An analogy could be when economists tried to calculate Soviet per capita income back in the 1970s and 1980s. They would take a basket of goods and basically say a color TV in the Soviet Union was equal to a color TV in the USA or W Germany. And so on with the basket. But it wasn’t true. Soviet products were horrible compared to Western/Japanese products.
At the end, you would get figures showing that the Soviet Union had a per capita income about 60% of Western levels, or that East German per capita income had almost equalled that of the U.K. (I forgot the exact numbers but it would be something like that).
There may be a little of that when comparing service industries between Japan and the USA. You just aren’t comparing like to like, as I see with my eyes here in NY
I lived in the center of Taipei, Taiwan for more than a decade, and I’ve lived in the Bay Area (both SF and San Jose) for several years, so I have a personal basis for comparison that goes beyond the stats I find online.
I can think of a couple reasons why East Asian cities seem much cheaper than their American counterparts.
The first is that there’s less pressure in East Asia to get into the right neighborhoods and the right schools. If you live in a lower-middle class neighborhood in Taipei and your children go to a school which is in the bottom twenty percent, you’re still living in a safe place and your children are still going to an okay school. You don’t worry about your children’s safety.
The same can’t be said of NYC or SF. Unlike the U.S., there’s no need for a person to escape the challenges of diversity in East Asian cities, and hence there is no financial pressure for them to do so.
What’s more, my wife and I didn’t need cars while living in Taipei for several years. We sold them because having them was more of a hassle than it was worth. The MRT, taxies, buses, etc., were all much easier and safer to use in Taipei than they were anywhere we’ve been stateside. But even in SF, which is not a car-friendly city, my wife and I could not live without our cars.
How expensive cities seem to you also depends on your own personal preferences and your own personal consumption basket. Economists like things you can easily measure. Apartment square footage is one such thing, but neighborhood and apartment cleanliness arr not. For me, personally, I would take a smaller but clean, newish, and very efficiently designed apartment in Tokyo over a larger but much older and dirtier one in NY. There’s no way to quantify that though. An apartment can be twice as large, but what does it mean to be twice as clean? Nor is there a way to quantify the feeling of taking the NY subway vs the Tokyo subway. But those are still real things.
You can also prefer the tremendous diversity of NY over the still mostly mono-culture of Tokyo. The feeling of leaving the country I have if I go to Flushing or Koreatown or Jackson Heights. Of meeting people from all over the world, neighbors who work for foreign country consulates at the UN or for Japanese trading companies, literally people I hang out with and met in the building elevator. That’s worth something to me, and I’m anyway not rushing to move to Tokyo despite all the disadvantages I listed for NY. But it’s interesting to me that Japanese are also not rushing to move to America. They have a very low rate of immigration, despite the higher salaries you have in NY vs Tokyo for instance.
Of course. But most people who enjoy the tremendous diversity of American cities do so while living in safe enclaves. And those safe enclaves are much more expensive to live in than the average cost of the city must suggest if you’re ignoring that aspect of it. Hence, the U.S. city seems more expensive to live in than East Asian cities, even if on average it’s not.
I can’t think of any place in Taipei that was unsafe for me to live or any place in the city I would not go at two in the morning. You couldn’t make me live in the Bayview-Hunters Point district of San Francisco on a dare, and that place isn’t even that unsafe compared to many U.S. cities.
That’s absolutely fair, it’s hard to appreciate diversity if you’re worried about getting mugged. But SF is expensive even in the bad neighborhoods no? Areas of Queens that look quite run down (they seem reasonably safe to me though), are more expensive than central parts of Tokyo. Maybe not necessarily on a square footage basis (I don’t know), but on the basis of a studio or 1 bedroom in one vs the other.
Small unit condos in literally the best buildings in Tokyo (Tokyo Midtown or Rappongi Hills) cost less half of what small unit condos cost in a new but definitely not oligarch level building on Manhattan. You couldn’t even buy a condo in downtown Brooklyn for the price of those condos in the best buildings in all of Japan. You know those Japanese condos are probably small. All my Japanese expat friends say their living spaces are bigger in Manhattan. But still.
It’s expensive just about everywhere in SF, but it still matters because we’re talking about the difference between averages found in comparative statistics and how they might differ from our perceptions of actually living in those cities.
The bad areas in an American city are, while expensive, still cheaper than other city neighborhoods. So if they are included in any generic stats comparing the cost of living in various cities (and why wouldn’t they be?), they will lower the apparent cost of living in that city in a way that’s deceiving.
For example, if the bottom 20 percent of neighborhoods in American cities are essentially off-limits for anyone but a young single male expat, then that will make those American cities seem more expensive to live in than they really are because they are a limiting factor for anyone choosing to live there. The whole city is not your oyster; only 80 percent of it is – the more expensive 80 percent.
As far as I know, there are no limiting factors like that in any East Asian cities. The cheapest places to live in East Asian cities are not the most unsafe, but simply the most inconvenient.
“I do not believe that the Chinese political class has ambitions of world domination”
As might be expected, I am much more pessimistic about this.
Of course, a lot depends on what we mean by ‘global domination.’ America had it twice in the 20th century, but the American version was very different than the Roman version, the British version, and the Nazi and Imperial Japanese versions of ‘domination.’
There is no evidence that China wants to take over the world in the Nazi sense. Plenty of evidence that their ambitions are not regional, but global. They almost never talk in ‘regional’ terms. They talk–constantly–about remaking the global order. The phrase they like to use is “a community of common destiny for all mankind.” Not for the East Asian section of mankind–all of it. Dismantling the American alliance system is always an explicitly mentioned feature of this future of common destiny.
I have a few book reviews coming on books that talk about this… if the publishers ever get around to actually *publishing* them.
I recall seeing a construction worker who had had a stroke or some kind of partially paralyzing industry who was out working, waiving passersby around a bit of pavement where his colleagues were working. There’s a lot of highly visible low-productivity work in Japan.
Here in Massachusetts, state law would make that an off-duty–but uniformed–police officer on “private detail”, paid police wages by the construction company.
recently finished peter navarro’s “death by china.” quite a hit list!
as far as china culture goes i can respect some things but, overall, i’m not impressed. i see more unbelievable animal cruelty videos coming from china then pretty much everywhere else combined. i’m not joking when i say name a species and i’ve seen as asian person burning it alive. says a lot about a culture.