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dolores ibarruri's avatar

Thanks for this, I'm a roughly HSK 5 level learner and currently making the transition from reading in textbooks and graded readers to reading real world Chinese, so I will (very slowly) make my through this.

Apologies if you do do expand more about this in the parts of the post I have not yet read, but I wanted to comment on your analogy to Roosevelt- specifically I wanted to say that there is a lot of mythmaking in discourse about Roosevelt's New Deal, and that it is important to separate these myths from reality.

Commonly it is said that FDR's New Deal saved America, I think this is the standard interpretation for many progressives. I do not dispute that the New Deal introduced many important innovations in regulation, social security etc. and indeed it did help to alleviate the symptoms of the Great Depression.

However was the New Deal the cure? In fact I would argue that it was not just the New Deal that saved America, but rather it was the New Deal followed by the massive increase in investment that happened during the US' rearmament for World War 2. If you look closely at GDP figures from that time, you can see the improvements from the New Deal policies lose momentum, followed by GDP growth going nicely again as America rearmed for the war. The final 'ingredient' for the cure was the huge shift in the international situation after WW2, in which America definitively became the number 1 economic power, replacing Britain globally, and Japan in the Asia-Pacific as the new hegemon.

If we go back to looking at China we can see the problems with the Roosevelt/New Deal comparisons. The government could do a big 'New Deal' to boost growth, but that can only get it so far- there is a very real risk that if they do this, they could get to the end of the program and end up with even more public debt and not that much more business confidence.

There is a little known Keynes quote about this problem that I like. Keynes said in a 1931 lecture that while he was ‘in favour of an admixture of public works’ he thought that ‘unless you socialize the country to a degree that is unlikely, you will get to the end of the public works programme…[and find that] you have shot your bolt and are no better off’.

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Yaling Jiang's avatar

Just curious, who do you think are "a small crop of people who are bearish 一小撮消极分子" about Chinese economy?

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