peter Zeihan 2020

[JagerIV]

Yeah, this would be part of the Keynes vs classical argument. Its a feedback, true. The problem with saying demand drives production is that, well, demand is basically infinite. Actual realized demand is thus much more determined by what the supply looks like, since the demand curve defines demand in relationship to a price. And what is one of the primary drivers of how sensitive people are to price? Their own personal ability to supply money, and thus their ability to supply things that can be purchased. Thus, supply drives demand. That not all supply is equal, and works on marginal utility, does not change which is the limiting and driving factor.

For example, if providing 10 horse shoes provided a blacksmith with $100 dollars of income ($10/shoe), the blacksmith's ability to consume is still limited if producing a 100 horseshoe would also only make a $100 dollars ($1 dollar per horsehoe). All that really suggests is that making a 100 horseshoes is not actually the best way for the blacksmith to maximize supply to his own use, and instead it makes more sense to supply $10 horseshoes and spend the rest of his effort supplying something else. Maybe outside of blacksmithing!

Thus, the primary determiner of what people are able to demand is how they are limited by their own ability to produce, though of course the value of their production is moderated by how demand sets the value of the production.

As in my example above, the family of 7 poor people in India want's to consume a lot more than they actually are able to do so. Obviously, what's limiting their consumption is not a limit on their demand, its the limit of their ability to provide goods to supply their demand.

As to economic illiteracy, economics is my wheel house. Mainstream economics is just unfortunately just as infiltrated and corrupted by Marxist nonsense as most other fields. Which, in normal Marxist fashion, often tends to say that wet roads cause rain.

Edit: plus, we do have to remember the context of why exactly china needs a growing population. Does China just need enough young people to fill critical domestic work needs, or does it need young people as a group to consume production. Young people being some sort of unique irreplaceable source of consumption just seems somewhat illogical to me. Consumption is much more connected to one's wealth, rather than "youth". The middle age chinese single man who is allowed to make $50,000 dollars of income from his work is more than capable of spending more than a current 25 year old Chinese man with 2 kids and a wife who only makes $20,000 dollars.

Peoples practical demand is much more tied to their income, which to a first approximation is driven by their productivity. After all, what meaningful thing is someone saying that a family of 7 poor Indians has a higher demand than Donald Trump by himself? Is there a way to say that for it to mean anything true or meaningful?

 

[LordsFire]

For example, if providing 10 horse shoes provided a blacksmith with $100 dollars of income ($10/shoe), the blacksmith's ability to consume is still limited if producing a 100 horseshoe would also only make a $100 dollars ($1 dollar per horsehoe). All that really suggests is that making a 100 horseshoes is not actually the best way for the blacksmith to maximize supply to his own use, and instead it makes more sense to supply $10 horseshoes and spend the rest of his effort supplying something else. Maybe outside of blacksmithing!

If Economics is your wheelhouse, you really, really need to step outside of your current patterns of thought, and either learn to communicate to other people better, or reanalyze your entire understanding of economics.

Because this paragraph right here? I exactly proves my point.

The Blacksmith has the ability to supply more than 10 horse shoes at 10$ a horse shoe, but there isn't enough demand to push production further. Thus demand is the determining factor in what he chooses to produce.

The very example you are giving, demonstrates how demand is what ultimately determines supply.

Demand and Supply, functionally can be viewed as curves. At higher price points, more people are willing to supply to meet that demand, but at the same time, less people have enough demand to pay for that supply. Both supply and demand are subject to diminishing returns.

However, if there is significant demand that is not met, that is a market opportunity. If there is a large supply which there is no demand interested in, that's not a 'market opportunity,' that's a loss that's already happened. Now, good entrepreneurship can help ameliorate that loss, or perhaps turn it into a gain, but that would happen by finding a different demand that can be met by the same supply.


I don't know who or what taught you economics, but either you're still communicating poorly, you didn't learn very well, or they were teaching nonsense.

 

[JagerIV]

Eh, your talking along the keynsian nonsense that everyone would be rich if people just were given money.

The demand for food does not feed people. Supply feeds people. Supply basically determines what peoples effective demand curve is. And as for people, a nations demand is much more set by its supply.

For example, in my earlier example, who has a higher demand: donald Trump as an indevidual, or 7 starving indians in a straw hut?

 

[LordsFire]

Eh, your talking along the keynsian nonsense that everyone would be rich if people just were given money.

The demand for food does not feed people. Supply feeds people. Supply basically determines what peoples effective demand curve is. And as for people, a nations demand is much more set by its supply.

For example, in my earlier example, who has a higher demand: donald Trump as an indevidual, or 7 starving indians in a straw hut?

...No, I am not arguing along Keynsian nonsense. Where did I say that people should be given money?

If you throw out the socialist claptrap, a strong desire to have things (IE demand) is what drives people to work. You must work in order to have things, and in a reasonably healthy society, this means that you produce things to meet other people's demands.

Creating perverse incentives, and culturally validating getting the stuff you want without earning it destroy an economy.

 

[JagerIV]

Which bring us to the fact that the kind of demand were talking about is much more limited by supply constraints rather than "demand". The "demand" a poor Indian family living on $10,000 dollars for a million dollar house is totally imaginary and unachievable because the Indian family will never in their current conditions have a spare million dollars to buy the house. They're demand for 1 million dollar house at their current income is going to be something ridiculously below cost like $1,000 dollars. Their demand is completely unrealizable.

The realizable demand for million dollar house is driven by the number of people actually able to supply $1 million dollars, and in general the number of people who can afford a million dollar house is set more or less by how many people are able to supply $1 million dollars of services comfortably over the life of a mortgage.

Demand is more or less infinite: in my horseshoe example, the blacksmith could sell 10 horseshoes or 100 horseshoes. Its just in that situation outlined what he faces each have an equal return to him in money. However, just because his personal profitability is met selling 10 horseshoes, does not mean it is then impossible for the blacksmith to keep increasing his productivity, he's just reached the limit of maximizing his profitability manufacturing horseshoes, and its better to switch to something else. However, if the blacksmith manufactured 10 horseshoes and 10 forks, his overall productivity would go up, and his realizable demand would also go up.

As a practical matter, aggregate demand is driven by aggregate supply. For example, take chinese coal consumption, to bring back to the topic: is Chinese demand for coal being about 4 billion tons driven more by the fact that china can produce many trillions of dollars of economic activity, and so is mostly informed by how much production china had last year? Or did China always desire 4 billion tons of coal at $100 a ton since the 1970s?

Or, is it more accurate to say that China's demand curve for coal in the 1970s was much lower because they did not have the material wealth to buy as much coal at their current prices as they currently can? What else would be the main driver of shifting their demand curve so much over the last 50 years besides their material productivity?

This I believe makes intuitive sense. For example, what is your current personal demand curve for a private jet? Assuming somewhat normal income, I wouldn't be surprised that your demand curve for a private Jet is negative: I would have to literally pay you to take a private jet. Now, lets say you publish a wildly successful book that makes you a $100 million dollars? Suddenly, your demand curve to buy one private jet might swing from -$100,000 dollars, to maybe considering buying one if you could get a bargain one for $1 million. The massive increase in supply you provided to the economy swung your demand for one particular good, private jets, by about $1 million.

Supply created some 99% of your demand curve for private jets. Thus, I feel fairly safe in saying supply created your demand.

 

[LordsFire]

Jager, you're getting caught up in higher-level concepts, while I'm talking about fundamentals.

I'm not sure if it's worth the time to try to hash out the differences in what we're talking about. If it is, this certainly isn't the thread to pursue it at great length.

 

[JagerIV]

But the higher level concepts is what we were talking about, which is why I didnt feel the initial need to start at the basic concepts and work up.

The entire question is about whether or not china needs young people to drive demand. That strikes me as a nonsense. All you need is productive people.

If our opinions of why that difference is the case requires starting at fundamental disagreement about economics to work up to why demographics are not necessarily this death blow to china, then this certainly is the place to have it.

After all, this is to discuss Zeihans predictions, and if the anaysis is off at the level of fundamental economic assumtions, that seems a good place to have the argument.

 

[LordsFire]

But the higher level concepts is what we were talking about, which is why I didnt feel the initial need to start at the basic concepts and work up.

The entire question is about whether or not china needs young people to drive demand. That strikes me as a nonsense. All you need is productive people.

If our opinions of why that difference is the case requires starting at fundamental disagreement about economics to work up to why demographics are not necessarily this death blow to china, then this certainly is the place to have it.

After all, this is to discuss Zeihans predictions, and if the anaysis is off at the level of fundamental economic assumtions, that seems a good place to have the argument.

So are we talking about higher level concepts, as you say in the first line of your post, or fundamental economic assumptions, as you say in the last line of your post?

 

[JagerIV]

Well, higher level concepts are built on the fundamentals. So I guess if the fundamentals aren't really agreed upon, you sort of have to talk about them together. As far as I can tell, the disagreement is whether say's law is true, which basically says that supply creates its own demand, with the standard paragraphs of qualifiers on what that specifically means.

Its basically the supply side economics vs demand side economics. Keynes is much more on the demand limited, while classical is much more on the supply limited. Zeihan struck me as making much more Keynesian arguments, which as someone trained in one of the few right wing Econ departments, which mostly like most other places more or less means anti left, right wing economics is mostly an anti Keynes training. Which may have left me come overly strong and assume greater agreement than given.

Edit: summary of Say's Law. I skipped the video bellow ahead of the 1.40 minute intro reading a storybook walking through an example, which I've made already.

 

[LordsFire]

Of course supply limits things. It couldn't reasonably be any other way, because you cannot buy something that does not exist.

It increasingly seems to me like it's clear that you are making a pile of assumptions regarding my position and argument, based on people you've argued with in the past. Now to be fair, that's a very human behavior that I'm prone to myself, but it's still getting pretty frustrated.

I'll take it to the simplest level:

People want stuff. Essential goods, non-essential goods, essential services, non-essential services, luxuries and non-luxuries, however you classify the various things, people want them. This is what creates 'demand.'

'Supply' is 'how much stuff is available?' It is what it is possible for a person to acquire.


Now, supply does not drive demand, because if there is no demand, supply is meaningless. There's a nigh-limitless supply of sand available in the desert, but good luck selling it, since nobody living there actually wants the stuff. Now, enterprising individuals can find people in other places who want sand (such as to dump on a rocky beach so it's more pleasant), or turn it into other useful goods, but the sand itself is not something you can sell inside of a desert.


In a healthy society, because a person has demand, he has to develop a way to fulfill that demand. Thus, he must produce something himself, in order to exchange for the other things that he wants. Create your own goods and services, to trade for other peoples goods and services. The alternative is to try to become completely self-sufficient, which while possible to some degree, is very inefficient.

In an unhealthy society, you can find all kinds of other avenues to get what you want. They basically devolve to three methods; begging, theft, and taking by force. If you can get the government to do one of these things on your behalf, it's easy-street for you, but terrible for the economy and society as a whole.


Now, as I've said before, there's a 'diminishing returns' aspect to demand. Once you have a decent house, while you would *like* a better house, you are more interested in having any kind of car at all than paying another 50 grand to expand your house. Once you have a decent car, you're more interested in having a good laptop than spending 10 grand to get a nicer car, etc, etc. Once you have enough money, you'll start looking back over what you already have, and deciding what you want to 'upgrade,' and this process can continually repeat as you have more and more money.

Again, in a healthy society, in order to fulfill your own demand, you need to work harder, get a better job, earn a raise or promotion, etc, etc, to fulfill that demand. On a larger level, a high demand for a product or service, also means that it pays more to fulfill that demand, which is good for economic activity and growth, because then you're building into the feedback loop of higher productivity=more wealth available to buy more stuff, to develop more productivity. IE, the more people are productively employed, the more money there is to buy stuff, leading to more demand for labor, continuing to improve the employment situation.

And yes, supply throttles how much of demand is fulfilled, but it's the demand that pushes for supply to be increased. As Say's law that you referenced directly states, any over-produced supply will rapidly find capital moving out of that economic sector to a different industry, and start fulfilling a demand that is not adequately served with supply.

Are you with me so far?

 

[JagerIV]

Fair enough. So, to make sure I'm with the point your arguing, your arguing for Zeihan's view of the need for young people to drive demand? That is the point I assume I am arguing against, and which much of my arguments are building to the refutement.

Am I correct that we are on opposite sides on this issue? Or have we totally lost sight of the initial point of contention and your not actually defending this earlier stated point?

As to the rest of your post, yes, you've said nothing at all controversial and all in line with regular understanding. However, I don't really think you've proved that Demand leads to supply. Certainly not that Demand drives the majority of Supply. At best, you've shown a chicken and egg relationship: more eggs can lead to more chickens, and more chickens can lead to more eggs, and vice versa.

This is of course the totally noncontroversial, centrist take: both are clearly very tightly related, and in a tight feedback with each other. That both feed off each other very tightly: for example, for someone to demand X Boxs, the supply of X boxes has to exist otherwise one wouldn't even be able to know to want an X box, but the supplier who invents the X Box has to be able to infer that there is a likely Demand for something like an X Box, and guess what that demand curve would look like.

However, the Zeihan contention as I recall him making it in one of his lectures I listened to and as explained by @The Original Sixth , Chinas apparent problem with its demographic is that it wont have enough "demand". I as I said I have a contention over this issue. Answering this disagreement I have felt requires explaining where exactly "Demand" comes from, as something realizable by China's industry. Thus, my question regarding 7 poor Indians in a straw hut making $10,000 vs 1 single childless Lawyer making $100,000 a year. Who has a higher "real demand"?

By the logic as it seemed to be put out by Zeihan, the 7 poor Indians represent more demand by virtue of being young and having children. By my Logic, the single childless Lawyer has more demand, created by his ability to supply more value.

Which one has more demand? Because if one does not believe that 7 poor young Indians making $10,000 a year have more demand than one childless lawyer making $100,000, then one of the core beliefs undergirding Zeihan's belief of what China's demographics means for China seem to be radically undermined.

 

[The Original Sixth]

However, the Zeihan contention as I recall him making it in one of his lectures I listened to and as explained by @The Original Sixth , Chinas apparent problem with its demographic is that it wont have enough "demand". I as I said I have a contention over this issue. Answering this disagreement I have felt requires explaining where exactly "Demand" comes from, as something realizable by China's industry. Thus, my question regarding 7 poor Indians in a straw hut making $10,000 vs 1 single childless Lawyer making $100,000 a year. Who has a higher "real demand"?

By the logic as it seemed to be put out by Zeihan, the 7 poor Indians represent more demand by virtue of being young and having children. By my Logic, the single childless Lawyer has more demand, created by his ability to supply more value.

Again, this is not my wheelhouse, but you don't seem to understand the position, perhaps I might have explained it poorly? Let me outline it as best as I understand it.

Yes, the lawyers makes $100,000 and 7 poor Indians make $10,000. But the ratio of wealthy Indian lawyers to poor Indian workers is not 7 to 1. It's probably closer to a 1,000 to 1. So the lawyer can can consume far more than a handful of wealthy Indians, but he cannot consume more than a thousand such Indians. As their combined wealth would be closer to $10,000,000.

Now let's, to some peril, expand that. You're a producer in cheap plastic goods. Do you want 1 Lawyer with $100,000 who may only need one or two things or would you rather have a thousand poor Indians who only make $10,000? That ratio is important, because the ratio of producers should be lower than the amount of people who consume. The major producers are the middle aged group; either through amassing great wealth or through more effective work skill. On average, than the average young person.

What happens when you have 10 million older people trying to sell into 1 million younger people? Well, not everyone is going to stay in business. And that's a big problem for China.

 

[LordsFire]

Fair enough. So, to make sure I'm with the point your arguing, your arguing for Zeihan's view of the need for young people to drive demand? That is the point I assume I am arguing against, and which much of my arguments are building to the refutement.

Am I correct that we are on opposite sides on this issue? Or have we totally lost sight of the initial point of contention and your not actually defending this earlier stated point?

As to the rest of your post, yes, you've said nothing at all controversial and all in line with regular understanding. However, I don't really think you've proved that Demand leads to supply. Certainly not that Demand drives the majority of Supply. At best, you've shown a chicken and egg relationship: more eggs can lead to more chickens, and more chickens can lead to more eggs, and vice versa.

This is of course the totally noncontroversial, centrist take: both are clearly very tightly related, and in a tight feedback with each other. That both feed off each other very tightly: for example, for someone to demand X Boxs, the supply of X boxes has to exist otherwise one wouldn't even be able to know to want an X box, but the supplier who invents the X Box has to be able to infer that there is a likely Demand for something like an X Box, and guess what that demand curve would look like.

However, the Zeihan contention as I recall him making it in one of his lectures I listened to and as explained by @The Original Sixth , Chinas apparent problem with its demographic is that it wont have enough "demand". I as I said I have a contention over this issue. Answering this disagreement I have felt requires explaining where exactly "Demand" comes from, as something realizable by China's industry. Thus, my question regarding 7 poor Indians in a straw hut making $10,000 vs 1 single childless Lawyer making $100,000 a year. Who has a higher "real demand"?

By the logic as it seemed to be put out by Zeihan, the 7 poor Indians represent more demand by virtue of being young and having children. By my Logic, the single childless Lawyer has more demand, created by his ability to supply more value.

Which one has more demand? Because if one does not believe that 7 poor young Indians making $10,000 a year have more demand than one childless lawyer making $100,000, then one of the core beliefs undergirding Zeihan's belief of what China's demographics means for China seem to be radically undermined.

The poor Indians don't just have demand, they are also creating future demand, as well as future supply, because people both consume and create, and they are not childless.

If you have less people, you have less of both, and thus your economy is poorer.

The specific effect that Zeihan spoke of is a bit more esoteric than that, but has some substance to it as well.

 

[Morphic Tide]

There's also base load matters. A person can only consume so much of a given thing, in one fashion or another. A lawyer with a six-figure income isn't quite rich enough to be getting multiple mansions or yachts or what have you, they're liable to only get one or two high-level luxury products of a given type, then maintain those products, leaving relatively little for further conspicuous consumption and having minimal expansion of other expenses.

Meanwhile, a thousand barely-surviving Indian households are a thousand separate households making ends meet, a thousand separate households worth of food and rent and utilities and other necessities. This makes for both more absolute flow of capital, but also a greater amount of conspicuous consumption overall because the people providing those necessities aren't expanded much, but receive that wealth in return, making for a larger amount of income that's "spare" in the end and having a higher flow of capital going on. And more importantly, what expansion their is in the necessity providers is more people involved in the economy-running commodity consumption like various entertainment products.

This is why industrial economies live and die on the middle class, because the upper classes don't interact with enough of the economy to keep it running, and neither do the poor. You need a lot of people with some finances to spare to keep the massive flow of goods running to keep all these industries intact, because of how vital economies of scale are to the viability of many of them. They have to be producing millions of a thing for it to be worth it to make and have enough of a profit margin to pay all their employees.

The Great Depression didn't start as a matter of nobody having money or nobody making anything, it's that nobody was buying. Factories made more than the public could readily purchase, breaking economies of scale, and then the general public responded by holding on to the money they had and spending only on their needs to stay out of squalor as long as possible. Food prices went through utter havoc because the farms produced as much as they could, oversaturating the market because they produced more than the population could consume, thus leading to them going bankrupt and leading to prices spiking.

I believe the better way of putting it is that economies run on consumers. Somebody has to pay for what you're making for it to turn a profit, and individual people consume only so much. At a certain point, you hit a brick wall of diminishing returns because a given household has reached its limit for consuming regular goods and begins conspicuous consumption in a mode that does not pay back into the wider economy.

 

[The Original Sixth]

There's also base load matters. A person can only consume so much of a given thing, in one fashion or another. A lawyer with a six-figure income isn't quite rich enough to be getting multiple mansions or yachts or what have you, they're liable to only get one or two high-level luxury products of a given type, then maintain those products, leaving relatively little for further conspicuous consumption and having minimal expansion of other expenses.

Meanwhile, a thousand barely-surviving Indian households are a thousand separate households making ends meet, a thousand separate households worth of food and rent and utilities and other necessities. This makes for both more absolute flow of capital, but also a greater amount of conspicuous consumption overall because the people providing those necessities aren't expanded much, but receive that wealth in return, making for a larger amount of income that's "spare" in the end and having a higher flow of capital going on. And more importantly, what expansion their is in the necessity providers is more people involved in the economy-running commodity consumption like various entertainment products.

This is why industrial economies live and die on the middle class, because the upper classes don't interact with enough of the economy to keep it running, and neither do the poor. You need a lot of people with some finances to spare to keep the massive flow of goods running to keep all these industries intact, because of how vital economies of scale are to the viability of many of them. They have to be producing millions of a thing for it to be worth it to make and have enough of a profit margin to pay all their employees.

The Great Depression didn't start as a matter of nobody having money or nobody making anything, it's that nobody was buying. Factories made more than the public could readily purchase, breaking economies of scale, and then the general public responded by holding on to the money they had and spending only on their needs to stay out of squalor as long as possible. Food prices went through utter havoc because the farms produced as much as they could, oversaturating the market because they produced more than the population could consume, thus leading to them going bankrupt and leading to prices spiking.

I believe the better way of putting it is that economies run on consumers. Somebody has to pay for what you're making for it to turn a profit, and individual people consume only so much. At a certain point, you hit a brick wall of diminishing returns because a given household has reached its limit for consuming regular goods and begins conspicuous consumption in a mode that does not pay back into the wider economy.

And that is why communist systems always fail.

Because it runs on the belief that central planners can balance the consumption and production aspects of an economy, while de-incentivizing the producers by confiscating the profits that they obtain through the consumers and redistributing it to those same people. It's one thing to take a cut for the benefit of society, such as roads and other common goods--but the benefit is shared. So it's bearable.

 

[f1onagher]

It's been a while since we chatted here and I just found Peter's first live stage event since the lockdowns started. I was going to provide a larger breakdown, but there are a lot of individual points to unlock and I'm writing this between deaths in Verdun so I'll keep it short.

Peter's long-term predictions remain unchanged. Globalization is ending and export-based economies are screwed. America doesn't care and won't be overly affected.

However, his self-admitted weakness on domestic politics really rears its head. Some of it is the usual arguable points. He sees the DNC's public rejection of the socialists as an outright rejection of said ideologies, rather than a disagreement on methodology. He also thinks that Biden will retain Trump's anti-China stance since the houseplant-in-chief has made no public moves to undo them.

What disappoints and angers me though is where he repeats the now disproven rumor that Officer Brian Sicknick was beaten to death by a mob and the unprovable rumor that Trump danced during the event. For a man who in this very lecture points out that the media is inherently unreliable, it's a shocking acceptance of bad info. He also indirectly supports the move by Big Tech to censor right-wing sites under the defense that all of big business was unhappy with the January 6th riot and that this in no way indicates that big business has drifted leftward. A few minutes after commenting that business has started working with urban centers to affect social change.

It baffles me since he contradicts himself two or three times in this lecture. Anyway, give it a watch and give me your thoughts.

 

[JagerIV]

Yeah, Zeihans interesting as a.different perspective, but I'm not sure he really gets all that much accurate. Or at least much more accurate than any other commentator. I think we already went over many of the earlier crticisms.

The China ones an interesting one because it's basically a domestic politicy question which he admits to being very ignorant of.

With how deeply imbedded chinese influence is in American Economic and political power structures, the barely anti china moves we made under Trump seem unlikely to be removed, and especially seem unlikely to be ramped up.

Id also like to ask what public rejection of Socialism. Old white man doesn't mean anti socialist. Or even anti communist. Socialists have been in the mainstream of democratic politics since the 1930s at least.

It seems like when people think pro big buisess necessarily means anti socialism, when big business and socialism go hand in hand.

 

[Cherico]

Peter really does not get domestic issues, and I don't think he really gets how bad the democratic party has gotten.

But he is correct on China after covid the democrats can not afford to look weak on china, and Biden expecially, that's a situation where he would get eaten alive by both his own party and the republicans.

Also this is a little dated he stated this before it was publically disproven.

Peter Zeihan's problem is that he admits that our media and news organizations are non functional but still wants to trust them, when they have decisively proven they can not be trusted.

 

[Arch Dornan]

But he is correct on China after covid the democrats can not afford to look weak on china, and Biden expecially, that's a situation where he would get eaten alive by both his own party and the republicans.

Not just his own party and the GOP but Uncle Sam's buddies in the Quad.

 

[JagerIV]

Eh. To the degree hollywood and universities are still reliant on chinese money, and Chinese influence and money can keep flowing into democrtatic establishments, that can paper over a check of a lot of unhappiness.

Im just not sure china will matter all that much to the plebs, certainly not on the nuances of exactly what is being agreed to, and probably a majority of the elites knows who's buttering their bread.

China policy I just dont see mattering to the people who get them their power. Or, theyre either pro china, or dont care.

Edit: like, when Biden called genocide a cultural difference, what exactly did that cost him? Did any elites currently supporting him turn against him? Did that move the needle on anything?

True, no politician wants to look "weak" on anything. But, the ideal policy for the current dems seems like it might be strong words and friendly smiles and passing the stacks behind the scenes.

Every incentive seems to be to be as friendly with china, practically, as they can get away with.