China ain’t degrowing, they’re growing, like rapidly.
You can totally argue it’s a more well planned, sustainable growth (I’d argue that), but Xi ain’t exactly making people go back to living in mud huts and farming rice now is he.
I mean I could have sworn I heard Xi is supporting communal farming but I could be wrong.
Degrowth doesn’t have to be 100% uniform across the board. We can still have high speed rail under degrowth.
Also, Xi can’t afford to do degrowth while China is under siege from the dying American empire.
Theres a place between living in huts and farming rice and the omnicidal consumption we’re doing in the west. Why even pretend that’s the only 2 modalities?
If we had China’s per capita emissions climate change wouldnt be the dire fucking disaster with a compressing timeline that it is. We could stand to degrow to where China’s at for fucks sake.
American freedom is owning every type of recreational vehicle and using each one for maybe 50 hours a year.
Speaking as both a degrowth-er and quasi-China stan, I think it’s one thing to say that developed economies need to implement some form of degrowth and quite another for developing economies like China to do the same. Pushing degrowth on everybody in the world at different levels of development is tantamount to the Global North throwing away the ladder that they used to get so developed, and forbidding anybody from bettering their situations. The United States needs degrowth if the world is to survive. Asking China or India or anywhere else to do something similar where there are still millions living in squalor is disingenuous at best. I recommend you read up a little on what “degrowth” even means, because it decidedly does not mean “going back to living in mud huts and farming rice.” I recommend, as a starting point, Jason Hickel’s “Degrowth: A Call for Radical Abundance” and Giorgos Kallis’ “Degrowth is utopian, and that’s a good thing”
Growth is a weird thing to be for or against. Housing one more person than last year is growth. Bombing one more country than last year is also growth. It’s a weird amoral, inhuman amalgamation of priorities.
Capitalism allocates resources to maximize growth (in profits) and lumps all causes - good bad and meaningless - into one category with no distinction between them. It is firmly pro-growth. It is firmly pro a weird amoral, inhuman amalgamation of priorities.
The idea is that no matter what you’re growing, you’re increasing the rate of extraction, which has negative consequences for the land and frontline workers.
A “degrowth economist” would say that if you want more housing you should take it out of the resources we currently use to make highways and military hardware.
Societies that are less consumption-based still need to get supplies places and keep the lights on, so building high-speed rail and renewables is a-ok in my book.
