Comment by JimmyBuckets

The obvious counterexample would be the previous most powerful empire in the world (ie the UK) ceding that title to the USA after collapsing after WW2? No war between the UK and the US was needed.

Its not an old idea at all. Its from a 2012 article by Graham Alison followed by a 2017 book on the rise of China specifically that Xi Jinping read and referenced.

Its claimed to be an old idea, but its actually only recently become popular

> Essentially its a very old (~2.5k year) idea that the interaction between an incumbent power and rising "challenger" power inevitably leads to war between the two.

It sounds plausible, but if it is this old there must be a long list of examples. What are some of them?

The how of the reference seems important, it's not like he brought it up first apparently

>Xi has referenced Allison’s term before. In a speech in Seattle in 2015, Xi said, “There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap.” And in an October 2023 meeting with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Xi said, “The ‘Thucydides’ Trap’ is not inevitable, and Planet Earth is vast enough to accommodate the respective development and common prosperity of China and the United States.

utterly repulsive ai slop

CNY displacing USD would entail allowing people outside China to buy really significant quantities of CNY-denominated financial products. This would entail CNY/USD changing so CNY is more expensive, because the default currency for financial products currently existing is USD. Which would slap a corresponding huge price increase with 0 increase in quality to all Chinese export. Which would murder Chinese manufacturing export. Which would entail laying off some grand proportion of an industry that employs 5% of the _human_ race. Which is why they're not gonna do that.

I don't think China wants to make the CNY the reserve currency because it would decimate China as a manufacturing hub. They prefer China to be Jakob to the U.S. being Esau. The red lentil soup can be quite bitter.

Is China still rising or already in decline?

I’ll believe it when I see it, there’s a spread between onshore and offshore yuan exchange rates due to currency manipulation. It becomes harder to manipulate a currency as more of it is created, and AFAIK countries are not loading up on Chinese govt debt, but I may just be unaware?

The USD hegemony isn’t because of oil, it’s because everyone wants dollar-denominated assets. Treasury bonds, US real estate, US equities, etc. Possibly Chinese exports could soak up some of the yuan demand?

It depends on what you find interesting. No crazy spy stories but I've been learning Chinese, so I've spent more time looking at things that are only written or said in Chinese.

Project 2025 wasn't really secret but it wasn't in the public consciousness until about a year later https://trends.google.com/explore?q=project%20202&date=today...

China also has a bunch of political philosophy nerds that crank out wonky policy papers. I keep finding references to this one by Wu Bikang, https://www.rmlt.com.cn/2014/0403/253621.shtml

I'm still very bad at Chinese and I don't assume that I understand that paper well, even with translations, but that paper clearly interprets the Thucydides trap very differently from how it's discussed here.

Chinese idioms can be notoriously difficult to interpret. From what I've seen, they're often an abbreviation of some passage from a famous text. The listener is expected to know the rest of that text and all the major commentaries that go with it.

I absolutely do not have a solid grasp of the full works of Mencius and I have fairly anemic knowledge of the derivative works but I'm fairly sure it's not just a simple euphemism.

My read of the idiom is that Chinese political philosophers claim that the basis of Western political philosophy is the balance of power between hegemons and the basis of Chinese political philosophy is the concept of the righteous rule/mandate of heaven.

His implication seems to be that Western nations are held together primarily by force whereas the CPC primarily maintains power by serving the people.

There's more than enough energy and resources to go around for humans to peacefully coexist "forever", albeit in lesser numbers than today. The civilization meta game is what ruins it, despite our best attempts to regulate that. And a global self destruct button helps massively... until it does not.

Not really, kindness also exists. It is the escape hatch from the evolutionary zero sum game and let's you pick a better equilibrium (bargaining vs pure Nash).

We can just not fight. There is enough room and resources,we can get more of them and build more efficient tech, and we are all more alike than different.

It's as much "human nature" as being a slave was once the nature of some (chosen) peoples.