China seems incapable of reading the room/learning from recent geopolitical events. There is no turning back once economies are decoupled and bridges are burnt. It’s almost as if Xi is high on his own propaganda and forgot he has to rely on the world economy to get his fiefdom beyond the middle income trap and through the crises (demographic, environmental, economic) to come. If Europeans are willing to pay double their heating bill so not to rely on Russian gas, there’s no reason not to consider alternative producers of rare earth, which are literally everywhere.
Yes you are so right. It’s very unfortunate dictator Xi Jinping is doing this out of nowhere based on no past events whatsoever. It’s really a shame we live in an acausal world.
I appreciate your sarcasm, though, I didn’t imply this comes out of nowhere. This escalation has been brewing for decades and is only exacerbated by Xi’s agressive doctrine.
Like for all authoritarianisms, the leader gets to score some short term points and everyone else loses. In this instance, China will lose more (practically speaking, its position as the largest exporter of some rare earth)
If Europeans are willing to pay double their heating bill
We’re not willing, we’re being forced to by our scummy governments. They never asked us for our opinion.
I was surprised by how overwhelmingly positive support was, I mean, you don’t need too much brain to understand the geopolitical context and motivation behind it. What’s left of your economy, and by extend, job, lifestyle, if a single bad-faith actor can put your factory out of business? Or threatens to let you freeze to death in the middle of the winter?
It was fun to see even the far left/right parties over here (who have open ties and funding from Russia) refuse to contest that. Complaints I’ve seen were within the “I get my facts from Facebook” crowds, who also happen to be incapable of understanding their energy bills and are oblivious to the subsidized/capped prices their governments applied to them (often to a greater extent due to their unfavorable financial situation, how ironic).
I don’t know which category that leaves you.
That’s interesting, the only support I’ve seen for it amongst regular citizens of Europe is from people that both:
- Are well-off enough to be able to take in the price increase without seeing their quality of life impacted
- Wanted to inflict economic hardship on Russian citizens through sanctions as a form of punishment for Putin’s policies
Even though I wasn’t very much affected by the inflation, I understand the reasons those sanctions aren’t supported by the majority of people here in Europe, and I sympathize with the hardship of people who already before that were struggling to make ends meet and feed their family, and weren’t able to heat their home last winter.
You can categorize me with the humanitarians. And I already know where to categorize you.
From what I can tell a majority of Europeans DO support sanctions. Do you have anything other than your personal anecdotal evidence to counter this data?
Are well-off enough to be able to take in the price increase without seeing their quality of life impacted
How much of this is perception vs facts, though? Most/all EU countries implemented some kind of subsidy or price capping to protect its more vulnerable population.
Wanted to inflict economic hardship on Russian citizens
Seems improbable, considering that one thing has nothing to do with the other. On the subject of decoupling, Russia is the only one to blame, for losing its bet that the EU would back-off under the threat of energy scarcity during winter. It was Putin’s plan, and it was miscalculated to say the least. On the topic of hardship of the Russian population, believe it or not, there is a large Russian diaspora in Europe, and people are generally quite sympathetic and supportive with the normal people. Also, the hardship is not the result of energy decoupling but that of the sanctions, and yep, it sucks to be living under a tyrant’s rule in a late-stage oligarchy, and even more so when the whole world is trying to find peaceful means to reduce its warmongering potential.
You can categorize me with the humanitarians. And I already know where to categorize you.
I don’t dare pretending to know you, which may be the higher humanitarian ground in this discussion, believe it or not.
In the long term the west will have no choice but to start creating their own supply chains, however that’s going to take many years to do. Meanwhile, China already has independent end-to-end supply chains and that means Chinese companies will have a huge advantage producing tech products using these rare metals giving China a huge market advantage.
China vs rest of world… bring it on
You mean China vs the crumbling western empire that accounts for around 20% of the world’s population and doesn’t actually produce much of anything? 😂
