Next Time Someone Brings up Collectivism: China Will Likely Corner the 5G Market, US No Plan

[TheBlackAdder]

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In a Global Economics on Emerging Economies course I took, I learned that China has locked in half of the world's croplands for the next 35-50 years, this includes a million square miles in Africa and almost that much in Central & South America. While the US sits back and enters into short agreements, that corporations often break, China is in it for the long-haul.

You may have heard that China has cornered much of the world’s supply of strategic metals and minerals crucial for new technology, including lithium, rare earths, copper, and manganese used in everything from smartphones to electric cars. As of 2015, China was the leading global producer of 23 of the 41 elements the British Geological Society believes are needed to "maintain our economy and lifestyle" and had a lock on supplies of nine of the 10 elements judged to be at the highest risk of unavailability.

But you may not know that China is also on track to control most of the world's flow of high-capacity online services—the new industries, relying on the immediate communication among humans and machines, that will provide the jobs and opportunities of the future.

China's Belt and Road Initiative, supporting infrastructure and investment projects in nearly 70 countries, will have profound consequences for 40 percent of the world’s economic output. Crucially, each of the many trans-Eurasian rail lines that are part of this mammoth project will be accompanied by fiber-optic cables carrying impossibly huge amounts of data across thousands of miles without delay. According to Rethink Research, China is also planning to deploy fiber-optic connections to 80 percent of the homes in the country.

China's ambitious deployment of fiber will have several consequences. In communicating with Russia and Europe, it won’t have to rely on undersea fiber-optic cables running through the Indian Ocean that might be subject to surveillance by the US. Even more important, it will have access to a giant market of consumers and businesses across an enormous terrestrial area that ties Central Asia even more closely to Russia as well as China.

(more at jump)


https://www.wired.com/story/china-will-likely-corner-5g-market-us-no-plan/

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[theophilus]

1. Many U.S. Corporations are, seemingly, in it for the short haul.

We will all suffer because of their emphasis on paying vast sums to wealthy investors and those at the top of their "enterprises".
Those who do benefit from 401K type situations will have those benefits sucked back to the uberrich during the next economic downturn.

[Firestorm49]

2. Great article.

[DetlefK]

3. China and Saudi-Arabia are effectively colonial powers now in Africa.

Saudi-Arabia is buying and stealing farmland in eastern Africa. The real owners get evicted by bribed local militias.

And China is buying mines in Africa like crazy.

China built a conference-center for the African Union. A huge building, complete with meeting-rooms, computers and everything. For free.
Then it turned out that all the computers reported back to servers in China every night.
An AU-official (who had totally not been bribed) assured journalists that this doesn't count as espionage, because there is nothing important anyways going on this building where politicians hold meetings.

[jcgoldie]

4. this is depressing

I live 10 miles outside of a town of 30k and only about 30 miles from a major city (St.Louis) and the only way I can get "broadband" internet is through a satellite dish (and it is not what most of you would call broadband at all).

[Voltaire2]

5. Chinese infrastructure investment is staggering

They continue to be a repressive totalitarian state, but it is undeniable that they are focused on developing a China of the future that will bring its people fully into the developed world, and they are positioned to be the leading economy of that world.

Our obsession with neoliberalism has resulted in the stagnation and decay of our infrastructure, the crippling of our public institutions, and by creating stunning levels of inequality, given birth to an uncontrolled resurgence of fascism.

[Hortensis]

6. China's impressive, all right, but the general yuuge-ness

of their recent achievements is only a part of the picture. A wider view makes clear that China has many also-yuuge, entrenched problems, which are mostly far larger and less solvable than ours.

Right now people are talking a lot about China's overwhelming debt, slowing economy and currency problems, but how about little clues to bigger underlying realities -- like the fact that China has 20% of the world's population (which is aging big time and another yuuge economic problem) but only 7% of its fresh water? Much of that water is as unsafe to drink as city air is to breathe because of rapid industrialization.

Of course the centralized government has been key to China's miracles. But distrust of increasing totalitarianism is also the reason many among the billion people all over that giant nation are becoming newly fearful. Express-train growth and change have destabilized whole regions and threatened obliteration of whole cultures, resulting in widespread unrest and rebellion. Civil disturbances are common. Wealthier people are transferring vast amounts of China's wealth overseas for safekeeping.

Rural millions forced by destitution to migrate to (unaffordable) cities are typically despised due to not just the enormous cultural and education differences but the burdens they pose. City women typically won't have anything to do with a couple hundred million impoverished young migrant men...a ticking time bomb. Here they elected Trump. There, they are almost as many as the entire U.S. population and, unlike the hundreds of millions of increasingly impoverished people left behind in increasingly unsustainable rural areas, are concentrated in cities.

And as debt balloons they've apparently overbuilt about as many "ghost" cities as they are going to to keep idle hours filled and money flowing to live on.

Btw, if we were China, sure we'd want out from under the power of the U.S., but how'd we like to have hyperaggressive Russia and crazy NK as replacement "BFFs"? We're not talking the Tres Amigos of the U.S., Canada and Mexico here.

On and on and on and on.

[fescuerescue]

7. Central Planning has its advantages

No committees, no endless meetings. Just put someone smart in charge

[malaise]

8. Get thee to the greatest

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