aaah, finally a male who admits that the legend of men and tools are really just that, legend. Calling in the experts do not neuter the male, at least not to sensible psyches :p

but seriously, ill feeling perhaps but then again, you would expect that of certain elements in every society whatever the colour of their necks but violence over consumerism and wealth in a world tearing itself apart over other vicious issues, would that really happen, are the various sides in this violence you picture really for war or violence, war tends to make people poorer unless one happens to be in the defence business. Sigh and one would have thought bthe luke skywalker/darth vader obsession went away with the star wars prequel.

incidentally, just how young are you? why the focus on younger people? was just thinking about some of the views expressed by some of the regular bloggers really doubt if they fit in your category of young?!

I find it odd how he defines “defending China.” I tend to “defend China aggressively at every turn” in the sense of supporting policies which I think are in the Chinese national interest. The difficulty here is defining “national interest” and once you have defined it then figuring out what policies advance it.

One thing that is the case about China is that there is no one definition of “national interest” and hardly a consensus in China about what policies support the national interest. This is what happens when you have a large nation.

Threefish: Very few of the great range of DVDs on sale in China can be bought legally in China, because the Culture Ministry does not approve them for release.

But this points out how specific industry concerns are. The IPR and politics issues with entertainment DVD’s are not the same as the IPR issues with industrial software or consumer software, which means what happens with DVD’s may have nothing to do with what happens with oil production software.

IPR protection isn’t a huge issue for the people I know that sell industrial software since the high margins come with training and support, and the software is useless without those.

Great!!!! So it looks like “China is costing US jobs” doesn’t even work there.

bigdog: The US is too diverse to make these type of assumptions, but of course the politicians do and pander to the voters (and unions) that way.

Which was my point.

Also in the end a politician has to vote one way or another, and you can tell a lot about how a politician is going to vote by looking at their district. They are usually under competing pressures which means that the way they vote can be surprising and not easily categorized.

One other thing, politicians often intentionally seem a lot more stupid than they actually are. About anything that involves re-election, they tend to be very sharp.

At the end of the day you add together all of the votes and see if you have enough support for what you want to do, and there isn’t support for large scale tariffs on China.

Excellent comments!

Michigan and North Carolina have been fairly aggressive in seeking foreign investment.

Don’t stereotype them just because one is the home of car manufacturing and another a state where historically the textile industry was big. There is a lot more to the economies of both states - North Carolina is the home to probably the best and highest concentration of biotech and medical research in the Research Triangle. And other southern states - SC, Alabama, etc have been very prominent in soliciting foreign manufacturing investment.

California is home to some of the most right-wing, anti China neo cons and Texas is - well Texas.

The US is too diverse to make these type of assumptions, but of course the politicians do and pander to the voters (and unions) that way.

Why do we always seem to be talking about China ..?

Good question. Personally, I think that GDP is far from perfect as a comparison tool, both level and delta. Much of my knowledge of both countries is anecdotal, but if I had to make a bet, it would not be on India, and I guess that goes for many people.

India has very poor initial conditions (it would take at least 1000 words to elucidate this) and only perhaps 200 million people who are highly socialized, artciculate and educated. Many of those work in (developmentally) wasteful professions like law, religion, arts and finance. If you take Japan from the Meiji period till say 1985 as the gold standard for industrialization (and please include that remarkable performance in Manchuria as well, anyone with an open mind, even a Chinese, should, remember Deng’s cat), India’s in vestment of elite human capital is completely wrong for a low-GDP country. In addition, many of its best minds work abroad. The higher levels of society sem to have a vester interest in keeping the rest poor (the scourge of Latin America). In the Japanese playbook the state beats the law often and the state listens to successful entrepreneurs but not to industry lobbyists. They kept the farmers (who grow food) on the land until needed them, had them socialized (women too), gve them tough military service and you would balance the urban and rural population and their diets in such a way that the rural produces a surplus and that the cities do not waste it.
You keep this up for say 50 years and then you can start worrying of what to do next..You may need different people for he country you’ve created..

I am not so sure that China can do something similar (or invent an even better mouse trap), but I strongly doubt India can do it. Both countries have one handicap: human noise in the industrialization process. In fact, some people call that democracy.

China built its first freeways in 1989. It’s not that difficult to create a massive network of highways, if that is what you want to do, and whether India should have massive networks is something that I’d be interested in hearing Indian perspectives on.

Huizer: India has severe domestic political obstacles to any form of infrastructure development.

So did China, but the political obstacles were worked around. The big political obstacle is funding, but on the other side, infrastructure creates lots and lots of jobs.

Something that I find amusing is that one of the few cases in which the Communist Party leadership got their hand slapped on was the fuel tax. The State Council and Politburo wanted to create a US style trust fund system in which highways would be funded by a gas tax, and the National People’s Congress said no since any gas tax could hurt farmers. The way that freeways in China are funded is by state owned corporations which charge tolls.

Huizer: So, it would take quite while for India to reach the rapid growth phase in the logistics curve where China is currenly.

India has been having sustained growth rates of 8-9% over the last decade. It has a much different economic and political model which is why no one seems to notice. One question that I find interesting is “why do we always seem to be talking about China so often when India is growing so quickly?”

For some reason I missed the significance of the alleged new POBC department in your post. Must be because I was also listening (after having walked way from the video) to a Turandot performance apparently recorded in the People’s Palace Museum in Beijing. Bombast drowns out meaning.
I think that it simply means that the POBC has reached a level of enlightenment previously reserved for the Monetary authority of Singapore. This is becoming serious: 1.3 billion people mimicking the policies of my beloved and exemplary City State. If you want to manage the exchange rate (for what? control inflation? make sure buddy’s factory stays competitive? suggesting to laobaixing that gvt is looking after his interests?) you cannot, according to standard undergraduate theory, manage interest rates independently, and, if you are Spore with a wide open economy, why would you want to have a monetary policy anyway. But what if you have an economy open only selectively and it is a bit large? Good Grief. Looks like the End is nigh.