Posts Tagged ‘China’
“The Middle East has oil, China has rare earths”*…
Often called “the seeds of technology,” rare earths are a group 17 metallic elements (the 15 lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium) with unique magnetic, optical, and catalytic properties vital for electronics, defense, chemical processing, petroleum refining, and green energy.
China’s dominance over rare earth elements creates an unprecedented vulnerability in global supply chains that extends far beyond the relatively modest $6 billion market size. The risk of disruption in supply of rare earths has become a critical concern as the nation controls 69% of worldwide mining operations, 92% of refining capacity, and a staggering 98% of permanent magnet production, according to Goldman Sachs analysis from October 2025.
This concentration represents one of the most significant single points of failure in modern industrial infrastructure. Furthermore, the rare earth reserves distribution globally shows heavy concentration in geologically limited regions, making supply diversification extremely challenging.
The economic implications of this dominance become clear when considering potential disruption scenarios. Goldman Sachs warns that even a 10% disruption in industries reliant on rare earth elements could trigger $150 billion in lost economic output, alongside inflationary pressures cascading through multiple sectors. Despite rare earth markets being 33 times smaller than copper markets, their strategic importance creates disproportionate systemic risk…
– “China’s Rare Earth Dominance Creates Global Supply Disruption Risks” [source of the image above, and worth reading in full]
Farrell Gregory explains why they figure so prominently in so much discussion of the global economy and of U.S.- China relations and what we might expect…
Over the course of the last year, we’ve seen China suspend rare earth exports twice, generating a short-lived round of public interest and short-lived “expertise” in America. Each crisis followed a similar progression: an aggrieved China introduces export licensing, effectively suspending US access to certain rare earth elements and downstream products. The American public is subjected to alternating shouts of panic and confident assertions that ‘rare’ is a misnomer and the necessary elements are actually abundant in the Earth’s crust. After a period of confrontation, and likely following concessions on both sides, access is reestablished before too much harm is done.
Examining the differences in each crisis is less important than establishing what is quickly becoming a pattern: China is increasingly willing and able to use its dominance in rare earths as leverage against the U.S. It’s worth noting what a change this is from even five years ago: during the entirety of the 2019-2020 U.S.-China trade war, Beijing never introduced export controls for rare earths, despite making threats to do so. Now China assesses its position differently — they’ve accumulated leverage and they’re willing to use it with increasing frequency.
This frequency might be in part because China’s dominant position in rare earths is a time bomb for both sides. The PRC likely wants to use its REE dominance to extract further concessions before the U.S. manages to defuse this dominance with some combination of reshoring and tech advances.
I think it’s a matter of when — not whether — China decides to activate its standing export control infrastructure. They’ve built up leverage, and over time, that leverage will dissipate. In the near-term future, throttling rare earth and magnet exports is still an effective threat to employ in trade disputes with the U.S. In the medium term, successful reshoring and reliance-decreasing efforts will diminish what concessions China can extract from the U.S.
So, expect the rare earth crisis cycle to play out again. When it does, here are a few clarifications on rare earths that may prove helpful for avoiding the most common misperceptions…
Read on: “China’s Rare Earths Chokehold: A Primer,” from @chinatalk.skystack.xyz.
See also: “Rare Earths,” from @profgalloway.com.
And also this: “China Is Overplaying Its Rare-Earth Hand in Japan” from @bloomberg.com (gift article).
* attributed to Deng Xiaoping
###
As we ponder paucity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1839 that the British East India Company [see here and here] established the Assam Tea Company and began the commercial production of tea (grown from slips furtively exported from China) in the region. Beginning in the 1850s, the tea industry rapidly expanded, consuming vast tracts of land for tea plantations. By the turn of the century, Assam became the leading tea-producing region in the world. That growth and innovations in tea preparation caused the price of tea to drop and demand to grow. Soon, London became the center of the international tea trade.
“Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power”*…
After skipping last year (presumably to finish his best-seller Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future), Dan Wang is back with his “annual letter.” An excerpt…
… I think the US continues to systematically underrate China’s industrial progress for several reasons.
First, too many western elites retain hope that China’s efforts will run out of fuel by its own accord. Industrial progress will be weighed down by demographic drag, the growing debt load, maybe even a political collapse. I won’t rule these out, but I don’t think they are likely to break China’s humming tech engine. Demographics in particular don’t matter for advanced technology — you don’t need a workforce of many millions to have robust production of semiconductors or EVs. South Korea, for example, has one of the world’s fastest shrinking populations while retaining its success in electronics production. And though China suffers broader economic headwinds, technology firms like Xiaomi continue to develop new products and enjoy rising revenues. Technology breakthroughs can occur even in a suffering society. Especially if the state continues to lavish resources on chips or anything that could represent an American chokepoint.
Second, western elites keep citing the wrong reasons for China’s success. When members of Congress get around to acknowledging China’s tech advancements, they do not fail to attribute causes to either industrial subsidies (also known as cheating) or IP theft (that is, stealing). These are legitimate claims, but China’s advantages extend far beyond them. That’s the creation of deep infrastructure as well as extensive industrial ecosystems that I describe above.
Probably the most underrated part of the Chinese system is the ferocity of market competition. It’s excusable not to see that, given that the party espouses so much Marxism. I would argue that China embodies both greater capitalist competition and greater capitalist excess than America does today. Part of the reason that China’s stock market trends sideways is that everyone’s profits are competed away. Big Tech might enjoy the monopolistic success smiled upon by Peter Thiel, coming almost to genteel agreements not to tread too hard upon each other’s business lines. Chinese firms have to fight it out in a rough-and-tumble environment, expanding all the time into each other’s core businesses, taking Jeff “your margin is my opportunity” Bezos with seriousness.
Third, western elites keep holding on to a distinction between “innovation,” which is mostly the remit of the west, and “scaling,” which they accept that China can do. I want to dissolve that distinction. Chinese workers innovate every day on the factory floor. By being the site of production, they have a keen sense of how to make technical improvements all the time. American scientists may be world leaders in dreaming up new ideas. But American manufacturers have been poor at building industries around these ideas. The history books point out that Bell Labs invented the first solar cell in 1957; today, the lab no longer exists while the solar industry moved to Germany and then to China. While Chinese universities have grown more capable at producing new ideas, it’s not clear that the American manufacturing base has grown stronger at commercializing new inventions…
Eminently worth reading in full: “2025 letter.”
Pair with “U.S.-China Economic Competition” (from Rand) and “The Outlook for China-US Strategic Competition in 2026” (an interview with Sarah M. Beran in The Diplomat)
* Lao Tzu
###
As we grapple with geoeconomics and geopolitics, we might remind ourselves just how fast China’s rise has been: on this date in 1967, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, the Shanghai People’s Commune was established following the seizure of power from local city officials by revolutionaries. Shenzen was, at the time, a sleepy backwater, just off what was then the British colony of Hong Kong.
“False confidence often leads to disaster”*…
In 1957, in the depths of the Cold War, Russia launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite– a success that surprised the U.S., which had rested comfortably on an assumption of technical superiority. Shaken, the nation responded with the Space Program and a broad array of flanking initiatives aimed at reinviograting education and innovation in the U.S.
Now it’s 2025, and America’s rivalry is with China. But in sharp contrast to the U.S. response to “the Sputnik moment,” America seems to be intent on a belligerent nationalism, rooted in a self-satisfied sense of superiority, that is only too happy to sacrifice the very things that could keep us in the global game– e.g., education and science domestically; the soft power that accrues to a good neighbor globally.
Kaiser Kuo, an astute observer of the situation, weighs in with a provocative warning…
The world feels unsettled, as if history itself were changing tempo. The familiar landmarks of the modern age are blurring, slipping away, and the stories we once told ourselves about progress and power no longer map cleanly onto the terrain before us. What we are living through seems, with each new day, less like a passing rearrangement of power, less like a momentary realignment of nations. We sense something deeper and more enduring: a transformation whose outlines we are only beginning to discern. History no longer feels like something unfolding behind us but something rushing toward us, urgent and impossible to ignore.
The economic historian Adam Tooze, reflecting on his recent, intense engagement with China, put it to me in July with characteristic directness: “China isn’t just an analytical problem,” he said. It is “the master key to understanding modernity.” Tooze called China “the biggest laboratory of organized modernizations there has ever been or ever will be at this level [of] organization.” It is a place where the industrial histories of the West now read like prefaces to something larger.
His observation cuts to the heart of what makes this moment so difficult to process. We have witnessed not merely the rise of another great power, but a fundamental challenge to assumptions long embedded in Western thought—about development, political systems, and civilizational achievement itself. We simply haven’t yet found the intellectual courage to face it.
This reckoning touches all of humanity, but it falls especially hard on the developed world and hardest on the United States, where assumptions about exceptionalism and hierarchy are most exposed and most fiercely denied. The familiar framing of China as “rising” or “catching up” no longer holds. China is now shaping the trajectory of development, setting the pace economically, technologically, and institutionally. For Americans especially, the deeper psychic shock lies in the recognition that modernity is no longer something they authored and others merely inherit. That story has outlived its usefulness.
The denial, the deflection, and the anxious overreaction so often seen in Western discourse are symptoms of that dislocation. Yet the reluctance to acknowledge this shift extends beyond governments, media narratives, or expert consensus. It includes people who’ve spent years thinking about these issues. I have been as susceptible as anyone—tempering big claims, second-guessing implications, staying in safer territory even when the evidence has been pointing in this direction for some time. There’s always a “but” when it comes to recognizing China’s accomplishments, a reflex to tick off the costs and enumerate the failings, to pull back just when the scale of transformation becomes clear.
The greater risk, I now believe, lies in saying too little.
This essay doesn’t rehearse the familiar bill of particulars on China—constraints on political pluralism and independent media; expansive security powers and preemptive detention; pressure on religious and ethnic expression; and episodes of extraterritorial coercion—not because those concerns are trivial, but because the task here is different. We’ve all learned to recite that litany, as a way of protecting ourselves from what real comparison might imply. The aim here is to confront, with intellectual honesty, what China’s achievements oblige us to reconsider about modernity, state capacity, forms of political legitimacy, and our own complacencies. Recognizing real costs can coexist with taking the magnitude of transformation seriously. This argument asks us to face squarely what has been accomplished and then measure ourselves against it.
And let me be clear: This reckoning is not a surrender. It is not an argument for abandoning liberal values, declaring authoritarian systems superior, or slavishly imitating features of China’s governance. It is instead a call for the kind of frank, sober assessment that genuine confidence requires—the willingness to acknowledge challenges directly, to learn from others’ successes even when they unsettle our assumptions, and to strengthen our own institutions through clear-eyed recognition of their shortcomings rather than defensive denial of their failures. Liberal democracy is indeed undergoing a profound crisis, but that crisis need not be terminal. The question is whether we will meet it with the rigorous self-examination that has historically enabled democratic renewal, or retreat once more into the comforting myths that have blinded us to both our weaknesses and our rivals’ strengths…
What the West should learn from China: “The Great Reckoning,” @kaiserkuo.bsky.social in The Ideas Letter. Eminently worth reading in full.
Pair with: “China Has Overtaken America,” @pkrugman.bsky.social and “China has copied America’s grab for semiconductor power.,” from @himself.bsky.social.
* Aesop
###
As we rethink, we might send birthday greetings to a character in a cautionary tale from history, Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor (The Hongwu Emperor) of the Ming dynasty, who reigned from 1368 to 1398. Under Zhu, China was the world’s largest economy and had it’s leading navy, projecting power and enabling trade beyond Asia.
But in the mid 15th century, all of this changed:
… shifting political priorities, and rising Confucian skepticism toward maritime commerce, the Ming government ordered an end to all foreign voyages. Shipbuilding for large vessels was banned, and Chinese citizens were forbidden from traveling overseas. This self-imposed isolation would have profound consequences. While Europe was entering its Age of Exploration, building colonies and global trade networks, China had turned inward, forfeiting its naval advantage and potential leadership in global affairs… – source (more, here)
“Stand firmly in the present and focus on the future”*…
In a widely-cited article from May, Gillian Tett marks a fundamental shift– accelerated by the Trump administration, but underway beforehand:
… in the 20th century free-market intellectual framework — which is the one in which most western professionals built their careers — it was generally assumed that rational economic self interest ruled the roost, not grubby politics. Politics seemed to be derivative of economics — not the other way around.
No longer. The trade war unleashed by US President Donald Trump has shocked many investors, since it seems so irrational by the standards of neoliberal economics. But “rational” or not, it reflects a shift to a world where economics has taken second place to political games, not just in America, but many other places too…
…this phenomenon is not simply about one man (Trump), but rather marks a much bigger turning point in the intellectual zeitgeist — of a sort we have seen a few times before.
One such shift occurred just over a century ago, when the globalist, Imperialist vision of capitalism that reigned before the first world war was displaced by nationalist, protectionist policies. Another came after the second world war, when Keynesian economics took hold. Then, in the 1980s, free-market neoliberal ideas displaced Keynesianism.
The fact that the intellectual pendulum is now swinging again, towards more nationalist protectionism (with a dose of military Keynesianism), thus fits a historical pattern — although few predicted that the swing would take quite this form…
… one important facet of this zeitgeist shift is that governments are no longer “just” focused on their country’s absolute wellbeing, but on their relative positions too. This distinction might sound subtle. But it matters deeply, as a paper co-authored by Aaditya Mattoo, a World Bank economist, along with Michele Ruta and Robert Staige, spells out.
That is because an “absolute welfare” mentality supports trade co-operation, but unravels “if rivalry eclipses any consideration of own- country wellbeing,” the authors say. Trump’s angry rhetoric about America being “ripped off” by competitors, in other words, reflects a bigger mental shift… an (obvious) factor behind this rivalry is that China is now challenging America’s incumbent dominance…
It’s worth reading Tett’s piece in full (gift link)– and noting that the real-world evidence supporting her thesis is clear. Here, let us look more closely at China. Adam Tooze offers a primer– all-too-appropriate to Tett’s argument– on how to see China’s historic development through the veil of macroeconomics…
In the global economic conjuncture there are few if any factors more important than the state and future prospects of China’s economy. In purchasing power parity terms, it is the largest economy in the world, with a 20 percent share of global GDP. Measured in terms of current exchange rates, China comes second to the US.
China impacts the world economy as a huge market for exports from other countries. China’s imports range from raw materials, to Europe’s luxury brands. The share price of LVMH, Europe’s largest company by stock market valuation, bobs up and down in response to the spending patterns of Chinese women, the world’s most rapidly growing segment of luxury consumers.
China’s exports are a huge part of global markets. And when China’s domestic demand is less buoyant, there is a surge of anxiety about “excess capacity”, the pressure of exports increases and we start talking about “China shocks”.
In the macroeconomic balance, as discussed in World Economy Now of May, China’s huge surplus is the counterpart to the huge deficit of the USA.
China’s currency is pegged against a basket of other world currencies. This is backed up by some of the more effective capital account regulation in the world economy today. Funds cannot easily be transferred out of China on a large scale. So, there is structural uncertainty about what the exchange rate of the RMB should be. The trade account would suggest stronger. The scenario of mass capital flight in the event of a loosening of capital controls would suggest a much weaker currency, as happened during the crisis episode of 2015. A sudden adjustment in the Chinese exchange rate has the potential to destabilize the world economy as severely as Trump’s trade wars.
For all of these reasons, China is at the heart of global macroeconomics.
And there are a lot of news to be concerned about…
[Tooze reviews the decline in China’s growth rate…]
… But as useful as it is, this macroeconomic approach also minimizes the drama of history and qualitative transformation. China’s economy is huge because it encompasses the material destiny of one sixth of humanity. In the 1970s, China’s national income per head was less than that of Sudan and Zambia. It was not just the most populous country in the world but also one of the poorest. China’s ascent during the age of globalization is not just one economic story amongst many. It is the single most dramatic development in world economic history, bar none…
… Today, with a per capita GDP in purchasing power parity terms of $24,569, China is officially classed as an “upper middle-income” economy. It has far outstripped India (which in 1990 was still ahead of China). It has overtaken Indonesia. It has surpassed Brazil and caught up with Mexico. China is now on the cusp of being promoted to the ranks of the “high-income” countries…
… So here we have two images of China: One, as a big part of global macroeconomics, the other as a world historic development story. The trick is not to play these two accounts against each other, but to figure out how they interrelate and condition each other.
If we can sensibly discuss China today as just another big economy, rather than a country struggling with basic development issues, it is because it has actually undergone something truly exceptional, namely, utterly radical economic development in the space of less than two generations.
Pause for a second to consider this twist.
Dialectics offers us a way of imagining the process through which quantitative change turns into qualitative transformation. And there is plenty of that going on in the Chinese case. For example, it is one thing to be a big player in electric vehicles, it is quite another to entirely dominate every facet of the global supply chain. At that point market share measured in percentage points, a quantitative metric, turns into power, a statement of qualitative distinction.
But China also spectacularly illustrates the opposite process, through which qualitative change on a huge scale – “opening up” and “market reform” – transform a society’s entire mode of being so much that it becomes discussable as “just another really big piece of the world economy”, no different in macroeconomic terms than the Eurozone or the US economy. A history of radical qualitative change gives way to bland quantitative metrication.
Social theorists and market practitioners both use the same word to capture this dialectic of quality into quantity – commodification. When your distinctive, branded product with its specific qualities and associated narrative becomes commoditized, it widens the market, but also erases distinctions. In intellectual terms, rendering China’s utterly radical, world-changing development story as a question of “global growth”, is something akin to “commodification”.
Of course, quantitative comparison enabled by commodification has many uses. No less than commoditized goods. But both accept as a cost the erasure of specific qualities. In narrative terms, it involves a kind of blindness to history – how we got here – but also to the wider social and political meaning of current trends and the network of social, political, cultural and material forces that may drive future development. We do macroeconomics no injustice, if we call it heuristic and algorithmic in its approach. Its metier is not the in-depth search for historical meaning.
If we are to have both we need to learn to shuttle back and forth in our economic analysis from quality to quantity to quality to quantity etc.
Of course, you might object that all I am describing in rather highfalutin terms, are the methods of any good economic journalist. A good economics story weaves back and forth between the particular and the general, the experiential and the GDP numbers. That is true. It is a familiar narrative style. But there is a difference between an anecdote that merely serves as a “hook” and the effort to actually find a keyhole or opening that allows us to enter into the complexity of historical reality. As Stuart Hall once put it, the challenge is to find ways of “breaking in” to the historical conjuncture we are trying to decipher…
… How does the quality-quantity dialectic help us to better understand China’s economic situation and its relationship to the world economy in the summer of 2025?…
[Tooze uses that dialectic to unpack four key issues for China: real estate/urbanization, youth unemployment/generational shock, trade surplus/manufacturing power, and deflation (the “accumulation regime”)…]
… This essay had been a forced march, the aim of which is to connect four points of common concern about China’s macroeconomic situation – real estate, youth unemployment, the trade balance and deflation – with broader questions of China’s recent history and development. Doing justice to any of these themes would require far more space and far more expertise than I have my disposal. My aim here is simply to demonstrate the value of this kind of approach. My aim is to alert us to the moments when quality flattens into quantity – when “world-changing hundred-millionfold urbanization” is recharacterized as nothing more than a real estate boom – and to suggest the possibility of different narratives. The aim is to allow us to see through the bare bones of the macroeconomic schema, to the more historically specific and ultimately more powerful forces that are at play.
I’m not original in suggesting this. This is just what good history and good critical social analysis ought to do when it wrestles with the limitations of familiar macroeconomic concepts. In this particular case I am indebted to the work of Lan Xiaohuan of Fudan university, whose book How China Works: An Introduction to China’s State-led Economic Development offers a fascinating developmentalist perspective on recent Chinese economic history.
But not the least attraction of this approach is that it actually allows us to hear – as in really hear – how the Chinese describe their own situation. China insists on referring to itself as “developing” and “development” as the key objective of policy. The phrase 发展 (fāzhǎn) recurs in the titles of the National Development and Reform Commission, the de facto center of Chinese planning, and the Development Research Council of the State Council.
All too often the question of whether China should be counted as a “developing economy” is treated as a matter of cheap gamesmanship. Western critics, allege that China shirks its responsibilities by insisting on its status as a developing country. But triviality aside, as I have argued here, the question is actually a fundamental one. China is a huge and complex society with a powerful regime undergoing the most dramatic process of socio-economic change in world history. To describe this ongoing process as one of development is, if anything, an understatement.
Indeed, the question is why we don’t learn from the Chinese. Would it not behoove Western advanced economies to consider themselves, as well, as “developing”. Or does the difficulty of doing so betoken a telling blindspot? Development as a conception of economic change embodies a notion of comprehensiveness, qualitative change and deliberate purpose that is a challenge to policy in rich countries. In the US the bold vision of the Green New Deal was reduced to the Inflation Reduction Act. Trump’s tariffs and Big Beautiful Bill are a parody of economic nationalism. The best that the EU could manage was NextGen EU in 2020.
As Wang Yiwei of the Academy of Xi Jinping Thought at Renmin University remarked to The Economist:
Development is a permanent “political identity” … The party’s legitimacy depends in part on the riches yet to come. “Once you are ‘advanced’,” says Mr Wang, “you are declining.
The frankness is disarming. But does the West really have an answer?
Eminently worth reading in full: “Whither China? – World Economy Now, June 2025 Edition” from @adamtooze.bsky.social.
Pair with: “The Two Chinas.”
And for context, “Structure and Interpretation of the Chinese Economy.”
(Image above: source)
* ancient Chinese adage
###
As we synthesize, we might recall that it was on this date in 626 that Li Shimin ambushed and killed his rival brothers Li Yuanji and Li Jiancheng in the Xuanwu Gate Incident. Li Shimin went on to become Emperor Taizong of Tang– the second emperor of the Tang dynasty of China, ruling from 626 to 649. He is traditionally regarded as a co-founder of the dynasty for his role in encouraging his father Li Yuan (Emperor Gaozu) to rebel against the Sui dynasty in 617. Taizong subsequently played a pivotal role in defeating several of the dynasty’s most dangerous opponents and solidifying its rule over China proper.
“The purpose of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is to destroy the old culture. You cannot stop us!”*…
… or perhaps (per the title quote above), China in the late 60s and early 70s.
Ryan Broderick, with thoughts on reactions to the recent assassination of United Healthcare’s CEO…
Last week, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was gunned down by an unknown suspect outside of a Manhattan hotel as he was headed to an investor’s meeting. The New York Police Department is now carrying out a manhunt to find the gunman, who is still at large. Authorities released four, unfortunately, dazzling photos of Thompson’s seemingly very handsome masked killer, revealed that his shell casings had the words “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” carved on them, and, also, found a backpack full of Monopoly money believed to belong to the suspect. Oh, also, the hospital Thompson was sent to after the shooting wasn’t in UnitedHealthcare’s network. All of this has only added to the social media frenzy around the murder.
In fact, the overwhelming response to Thompson’s death online could be summed up as “lol, lmao even.” But it, should be noted, that it’s not just chronically online shitposters celebrating Thompson’s death. It’s possible this is the most aligned America — well, aside from the folks in its highest tax brackets — has been about a news story since the invention of the internet.
An announcement on Facebook from UnitedHealthcare had to have reaction counts turned off because of the amount of laughing emojis users were adding to it. Right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro’s viewers were breaking rank in the comments underneath a video of his about the killing. Reddit moderators couldn’t contain a thread about it on r/medicine. There was a lookalike contest for Thompson’s killer in Washington Square Park over the weekend. There’s a ton of merch with “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” popping up. And there are even some fun conspiracy theories…
… Reporter Taylor Lorenz went long over in User Mag about about how, no, this does not mean that an overwhelming amount of the country is pro-murder, or whatever. “Thousands of Americans (myself included) are fed up with our barbaric healthcare system and the people at the top who rake in millions while inflicting pain, suffering, and death on millions of innocent people,” she wrote. And Today In Tabs’ Rusty Foster put it another way, writing, “A nation full of people absolutely parched for consequences and with nothing to look forward to but rising fascism.”
The only recent story like this that you can really point to is the assassination of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2022. His killer revealed that he carried out the attack because of Abe’s support of the Unification Church, a cult-like religious order that wields a tremendous amount of political influence in Japan. And the overwhelming response from both the Japanese public and lawmakers, alike, was, yeah, actually, he had a point. I don’t think Thompson’s murder is suddenly going to lead to the dismantling of America’s cruel and inhumane healthcare industry, but it’s certainly been a cathartic few days online.
It has also quickly unraveled a decade-plus of right-wing programming in online spaces for young men. Many of whom are suddenly realizing maybe there are meatier subjects to take their anger out on than the racial makeup of Star Wars casting announcements. The best example being a thread yesterday on the subreddit for the edgelord streamer Asmongold, where users were enthusiastically talking about giving up the culture war to focus on a “class war”. The thread was deleted eventually for being “political,” but the same conversations are happening all over the manosphere right now. Which, you know, I don’t think anyone had an anonymous assassin on their list of possible “Leftist Joe Rogan’s,” but it seems like he’s moved to the head of the pack.
As Bluesky user hayao.lol wrote, “However this ends up [as of this writing, authorities have detained “a person of interest”] the guy won, flat out. This has done more damage to the image of the surveillance state, public complacency around healthcare, and ‘cops’ as a concept than any other single act.” Which I suspect is what’s actually making US elites so uncomfortable about all of this.
Thompson’s death [has] been a real shock to the system for America’s ruling class, who seem to be realizing for the first time that the majority of the country will not mourn their deaths. As podcaster and reporter Michael Hobbes wrote a few years ago, “I think we’ll look back on the last decade as a time when social media gave previously marginalized groups the ability to speak directly to elites and, as a result, elites lost their minds.” Which is why a whole bunch of tedious hall monitors are suddenly tut-tutting about all the memes in every major newspaper. I, personally, am not going super hard on the pro-assassination memes — as funny as they are — because we just don’t know what the motive was. We live in a time of mass accelerationist violence and I don’t feel like publicly cheerleading a guy who might have a compound full of deranged far-right ramblings. But I’m also not stupid enough to think that scolding the entire internet for how they’re acting is a meaningful use of my time on planet Earth. Maybe if I had a paid column somewhere — or proper health insurance — I’d feel different…
History suggests that when a political/economic system needs reset, but those who control it resist, the consequence can be an explosive period of painful brutality… that’s to say, “brutal” in that it is too often too bloody, and “brute” in that it is a blunt instrument, inflicting pain and damage much more broadly than just on its ostensible targets… a period of chaos too often followed by an autocracy (a la Napoleon in France and CCP one-party rule in China). The only way to avoid such an explosion is to begin making the changes that can alleviate pressure– to address the real needs of those whose suffering is fueling their growing anger– before that pressure destroys the system entirely.
Fix it, or it fails completely… and quite possibly catastrophically.
Learning from tragedy– on the warning shot that killed the United Healthcare CEO: Trying to scold the entire internet,” from @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social.
See– do see– also: “Radicalized,” from Cory Doctorow
* An unnamed Red Guard, 1966
###
As we contemplate consequences, we might recall that it was on this date in 1915 that Chinese president Yuan Shikai proclaimed the Empire of China (AKA the Hongxian Monarchy), an attempt to reinstate the monarchy in China, with himself as emperor. His reign was short-lived: a civil war broke out 10 days later; in March of 1916, Yuan “abdicated,” and the republic was restored. The republican cause was set back by several years, and China entered into a period of fracture and conflict among a number of local warlords.
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