By Michael Every of Rabobank
The Boxer-Shorts Rebellion
Sadly but truthfully, very few Americans know anything about Chinese history. That includes Wall Street’s ‘China’ teams; DC think-tank ‘experts’; and politicians. Equally, a smaller but still overwhelming majority of Chinese people don’t know much about the shorter-but-nuanced history of the US. Most Americans also don’t know much about American history….and most Chinese people don’t know much about Chinese history either. I’ve been lucky enough to live in nine different countries (10 if you count the US via my father as proxy); and not one of them teaches an honest, no-holds-barred evaluation of its own national history. It’s all edited highlights – a bit like social media we spend all day on rather than learning any history.
This matters because aside from the randomness of day-to-day movement of markets - which yesterday bounced to reverse Wednesday’s slump: long live profit-free tech stocks, apparently - if you don’t learn from history then you are damned to repeat it. The only question is if, like the analysts who repeat Marx repeating Hegel repeating that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, this time it is going to be tears, or tears of laughter.
In particular, very important developments may be taking place in China. Western sportswear and clothing retailers such as Nike, Adidas, and H&M have all made recent statements they are “concerned about reports of forced labor” in Xinjiang, or have stopped buying cotton from it completely. The Chinese response has been furious: official rhetoric is withering - “China is not to be messed with,” and those who do “will find that we...