Advice for China

Archives, accessed 11/21/2017

China will be the superior country in the future if the US does not alter its current course of actions and political behaviors now. There will be no contest, especially if there is an armed conflict, because of the choices, attitudes, and outlooks of the people who make public choices on our collective behalf.  The Chinese officials will out-maneuver, out-smart, and eventually eclipse the US if the US officials do not get a clue about governing and handling diplomacy.
  
The only flaw in China's current behavior and outlook, is that its current state will sow the seeds of its own demise as a world power in the future.  If it does not take on a much more compassionate, aware, and wise approach to reaching for and handling great power, China will follow the same path that the Americans took in their development, and end up in a similar position as the US currently is in as a nation. If I were China, I would not want to follow the American example.  It only brought the US perpetual war in far away countries that do not need to be meddled in for national security concerns. China will take on the civil strife and conflict that the US had, and the leadership of the CCP will fragment in factional infighting.  The people will grow tired of the pettiness as the maintenance of social order becomes less effective at holding back the storm.  Domestic security is expensive, and when a nation is abroad, engulfed in conflicts throughout the world, much of those resources begin to drain out to the home society when they are most needed at home to provide for the domestic citizenry.
 
If you want an effective and efficiently functional social unit, you're going to need to invest in improving or maintaining people, places, lives, livelihoods, and infrastructure to support it.  That means the government needs to work with populations of people on the local level, and base the upper levels of social governing on improving those local conditions with resources pulled from wealthier segments and sections of the society.  This means enabling honest feedback from people, and tailoring dialogue with people to figure out what's real and what's effective for improving the society.  

It also means finding consensus and working through international problems without military force in a balanced function.  Do not make the mistake of the Athenians, who behaved as a maritime imperial power, in spite of its democratic system of government, and got destroyed by many enemies and former friends in the Peloponnesian War with Sparta.  The logic of the Melian Dialogue, that might essentially makes right, is not a sustainable or favorable attitude and approach to take in international governing, even with "lesser"  nations.  In time, those small enemies become more numerous and spread out as you spend more resources and attention on repression and coercion, and less on the services and public goods that enable you to rise in power in the first place.  This principle applies on the domestic and international scales, from relationships with individual people, to nation states and meta-ethnic groups (to use Turchin's word for civilization).

We're in for a very dark time if things continue on the same courses of action, behavior, and outlook.  Only a change in all three will enable us to begin getting ourselves away from the rocks.  I'm not optimistic that it'll actually happen.  But the opportunity is still there for now.  What a mess.