Latest news with #Postwar
The Herald Scotland
14-06-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Churchill won the war but lost the peace - was that inevitable?
Plus ca change. The popular history of the Second World War - as pushed by newspapers and the media in general - is usually the story of Churchill. He is the Second World War in the popular imagination. The fact that he was a much more divisive figure back then is often written out of the story, as is the fact that he was leading a coalition government which included many of those who would be part of the radical Labour government of 1945; a government that would essentially create the world we have been living in for the last 80 years; the NHS, the welfare state, nationalised industry (now largely gone, of course) and the postwar consensus that has been fraying since the Thatcher era and is now in the age of Trump perhaps about to disappear. Read more The 1945 election is the subject of historian David Runciman's new 20-part Radio 4 series Postwar which has been stripped across the week from Monday to Friday and continues over the coming weeks (though as I write this many of the episodes are already available on BBC Sounds). These short, sharp historical nuggets paint a more detailed picture than the broad sweep, romanticised history that we get in VE anniversary broadcasts. And it explains why the newspapers got it so wrong. In 1945, Churchill may have been respected and admired, but the British people didn't want him any more. They wanted change. Labour embodied that change. And so ushered in the most radical government of the 20th century (whatever Thatcher fanboys might tell you). 'Why did the man who won the war, the hero of the hour and a hero for the ages, find himself so decisively rejected by the electorate?' Runciman asked in the first episode on Monday. His argument was that Britain had already changed because of the war. It was being run by a coalition government which had taken control of employment, prices, health, education, food. In other words, it was not very Tory, despite the man leading it. 'The new world was already here,' Runciman pointed out. 'It had been created during the war, the question was … who could be trusted with it.' Not Churchill. His reputation in 1945 was less black and white than it is now. He was seen as a man of war, not of peace. And a gambler who was willing to take risks. Many still remembered his gamble at Gallipoli in the First World War that had led to the death of thousands of British soldiers. Perversely, his opponent, Clement Atlee was seen as more conservative and therefore more reliable. (Atlee had fought at Gallipoli and actually approved of Churchill's gamble.) The country was still at war when the election was held. The previous election was in 1935. That meant that in 1945 no one under the age of 30 had voted in a British election (the voting age was still 21). But many of them had fired a gun. The Labour manifesto of 1945 was that rare thing in politics, a genuine bestseller. Voters were hungry for postwar Britain to begin. Kenny Logan (Image: Royal & Awesome) The problems were hardly over, of course. The dismantling of empire and the construction of a postwar peace both loomed large. And the new Britain that emerged was very far from perfect. But it aspired to make a better world for its citizens. However flawed the result, there's a heroism in that. But that's a story we rarely tell ourselves. Postwar deserves credit for doing so. Over on Radio 2 Kenny Logan - of Scottish rugby and Strictly Come Dancing fame - was guest on Vernon Kay's Tracks of My Years slot this week. In between his record choices he spoke about his dyslexia, his prostate cancer diagnosis, farming and Strictly (natch). But the most moving part of the conversation came at the end of the week when he talked about the late, great Doddie Weir, his team mate who battled motor neurone disease in his later years. You could hear the catch in Logan's voice as he spoke about Weir. But the joy too as he recalled a day out with Weir bouncing over a hayfield in the car singing along to Amy MacDonald's This is the Life. In the end we are the memories we leave behind. Listen Out For: Private Passions, Radio 3, Sunday, June 15, noon Singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega is Michael Berkeley's guest on this Sunday's edition of Private Passions. Given that The Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon was also a recent guest I can hear a few Radio 3 refuseniks seeing this as another sign of the station dumbing down. But listening to Vega is always worth your time and her musical choices do include Debussy, Bartok and Philip Glass.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Opinion - A ‘tofu-dreg' edifice: Most of China's official economic data is probably fake
China reported remarkable economic growth of 5.4 percent in the first quarter of 2025. Its growth is fascinating, since it far outstripped all large economies. It is also noteworthy because it comes amid China's collapsing real estate bubble, stagnant growth in its second-largest export market (Europe), negative growth in its top export market (the U.S.), falling domestic population and deflation. How did China achieve this miracle? The answer is simple — it didn't. For at least a decade, China's growth story has been a triumph of propaganda and a testament to the willingness of lazy, gullible western journalists and institutions to accept it. In truth, whether we're talking GDP, economic growth, deflation or demographics, the official Chinese data is a tofu-dreg edifice that cannot mask China's severe underlying societal problems. China's official growth statistics are reminiscent of Bernie Madoff's quarterly updates to his clients. For decades, the high-priced con artist delivered a stream of steady investment returns. Markets went up, markets went down, yet Madoff delivered with barely a hiccup. Investors and journalists thought he was a genius. Yet his very consistency was actually evidence of fraud. Likewise, the western media and financial establishment have swallowed whole the idea that China and its increasingly central-planned economy is a genius model that can do no wrong. China's claims that it hits or exceeds its growth targets over and over and over continue to be accepted at face value. Even in years where it is impossible to fake a 5 percent growth rate, China's claims remain absurd. In the COVID year of 2020, China claimed over 2.2 percent growth, even as the world economy (despite including this likely-fudged Chinese data) shrank by nearly 3 percent. Independent researchers have become wise to this fraud. Alternate measures suggest that China's economy may have declined in 2023, rather than grown by the government-targeted 5 percent. Research from the University of Chicago suggests that China's economy may be as much as 60 percent smaller than officially reported. Even if one accepts Chinese data, a portion of the reported growth is economically useless. With overbuilt infrastructure and vast swaths of empty apartment buildings, China has embraced a version of Bastiat's broken window fallacy — where any type of economic activity, including construction of useless assets, counts the same as real or useful economic activity. China and its ruling clique, the Chinese Communist Party, are continuing a long tradition of communist or socialist authoritarian nations faking economic statistics. Historian Tony Judt discussed this in his tome 'Postwar,' wherein he exposited on the bankruptcy of communist Eastern Europe, offering up decades of statistical claims later proven to be lies. Clearly, Karl Marx left out fraud as a fundamental tenet of communism. As bad as Chinese economic growth statistics are, China's population and demographic data may be worse. Although the economic data are presumed merely inflated to conceal slower growth, the population data likely conceal a demographic disaster that is gaining speed every day. Dr. Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin, an expert in China's demographics and prominent critic of that country's one-child policy, has been digging into the details of China's population claims — and what he has found is not good. For starters, Yi believes that China's population is overestimated by at least 130 million — more than one-third of the U.S. population. In a recent monograph, Yi details the many discrepancies buried within China's current and past census data. For example, China requires a tuberculosis vaccine for all newborns — data that allows researchers to cross-check the reported number of births. The data matched official birth statistics in 2009 and 2010. But by 2018, the 6.21 million reported vaccination doses implied at best 9.9 million births, far less than China's claimed 15.23 million births. The 2019 and 2020 data had similar large discrepancies. In another data point, China reported 13.79 million children under the age of one in 2000. Yet the 2010 census claimed there were 14 million 10-year-olds. But the magical appearance of a quarter-million children had expanded by 2014, when the number of ninth-graders (a direct analogue to age 14) was reported as 14.26 million. At every level of China's government, there is every incentive to fake population numbers. Local governments are highly dependent on fiscal transfers from the central government. Higher populations mean more money. Yet this research is not necessary to know that something is fishy in the Chinese data. China's fertility rate fell below replacement (2.1 children per woman) in 1991 and quickly fell further to 1.522 in 1998. After 1998, the data starts to look strange. Fertility, we are to believe, stopped falling in 1998, despite ever rising wealth, education and urbanization — all factors directly correlated with lower rates of reproduction. In fact, the rate supposedly increased by more than 15 percent from its low in 1998 to 2012. This makes no sense. Not only is this rise completely counter to experiences throughout the world, it is strongly against what happened in culturally similar societies in East Asia. Furthermore, China maintained its one-child policy through 2013. A fertility rate over 1.5 implies either a majority of women were having two children or a substantial number of women were having three or more children. And natural decrease has not been balanced by immigration — according to publicly available data, China has had a net outflow of migrants every year since 1960. The gathering demographic erosion of China is not some historical curiosity. It implies a fast-aging population with less dynamism and an increasing social welfare burden. Shifting demographics removed Japan as an economic competitor to the U.S. in the 1990s, and the same dynamic is at work against China. China's average age is already higher than that of the U.S. China remains a dangerous county. American officials and President Trump must understand that opening up China to U.S. exports is not a very good trade-off. Increasing demographic and economic pressures are likely to make China more aggressive in the near-term. Auguste Comte once said; 'Demography is destiny.' For China, that destiny — aging and economic atrophy — is here, and it is a serious problem for China and the world. But determining how to handle it requires an embrace of facts over official fictions. Keith Naughton is co-founder of Silent Majority Strategies, a public and regulatory affairs consulting firm, and a former Pennsylvania political campaign consultant. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
15-05-2025
- Business
- The Hill
A ‘tofu-dreg' edifice: Most of China's official economic data is probably fake
China reported remarkable economic growth of 5.4 percent in the first quarter of 2025. Its growth is fascinating, since it far outstripped all large economies. It is also noteworthy because it comes amid China's collapsing real estate bubble, stagnant growth in its second-largest export market (Europe), negative growth in its top export market (the U.S.), falling domestic population and deflation. How did China achieve this miracle? The answer is simple — it didn't. For at least a decade, China's growth story has been a triumph of propaganda and a testament to the willingness of lazy, gullible western journalists and institutions to accept it. In truth, whether we're talking GDP, economic growth, deflation or demographics, the official Chinese data is a tofu-dreg edifice that cannot mask China's severe underlying societal problems. China's official growth statistics are reminiscent of Bernie Madoff's quarterly updates to his clients. For decades, the high-priced con artist delivered a stream of steady investment returns. Markets went up, markets went down, yet Madoff delivered with barely a hiccup. Investors and journalists thought he was a genius. Yet his very consistency was actually evidence of fraud. Likewise, the western media and financial establishment have swallowed whole the idea that China and its increasingly central-planned economy is a genius model that can do no wrong. China's claims that it hits or exceeds its growth targets over and over and over continue to be accepted at face value. Even in years where it is impossible to fake a 5 percent growth rate, China's claims remain absurd. In the COVID year of 2020, China claimed over 2.2 percent growth, even as the world economy (despite including this likely-fudged Chinese data) shrank by nearly 3 percent. Independent researchers have become wise to this fraud. Alternate measures suggest that China's economy may have declined in 2023, rather than grown by the government-targeted 5 percent. Research from the University of Chicago suggests that China's economy may be as much as 60 percent smaller than officially reported. Even if one accepts Chinese data, a portion of the reported growth is economically useless. With overbuilt infrastructure and vast swaths of empty apartment buildings, China has embraced a version of Bastiat's broken window fallacy — where any type of economic activity, including construction of useless assets, counts the same as real or useful economic activity. China and its ruling clique, the Chinese Communist Party, are continuing a long tradition of communist or socialist authoritarian nations faking economic statistics. Historian Tony Judt discussed this in his tome 'Postwar,' wherein he exposited on the bankruptcy of communist Eastern Europe, offering up decades of statistical claims later proven to be lies. Clearly, Karl Marx left out fraud as a fundamental tenet of communism. As bad as Chinese economic growth statistics are, China's population and demographic data may be worse. Although the economic data are presumed merely inflated to conceal slower growth, the population data likely conceal a demographic disaster that is gaining speed every day. Dr. Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin, an expert in China's demographics and prominent critic of that country's one-child policy, has been digging into the details of China's population claims — and what he has found is not good. For starters, Yi believes that China's population is overestimated by at least 130 million — more than one-third of the U.S. population. In a recent monograph, Yi details the many discrepancies buried within China's current and past census data. For example, China requires a tuberculosis vaccine for all newborns — data that allows researchers to cross-check the reported number of births. The data matched official birth statistics in 2009 and 2010. But by 2018, the 6.21 million reported vaccination doses implied at best 9.9 million births, far less than China's claimed 15.23 million births. The 2019 and 2020 data had similar large discrepancies. In another data point, China reported 13.79 million children under the age of one in 2000. Yet the 2010 census claimed there were 14 million 10-year-olds. But the magical appearance of a quarter-million children had expanded by 2014, when the number of ninth-graders (a direct analogue to age 14) was reported as 14.26 million. At every level of China's government, there is every incentive to fake population numbers. Local governments are highly dependent on fiscal transfers from the central government. Higher populations mean more money. Yet this research is not necessary to know that something is fishy in the Chinese data. China's fertility rate fell below replacement (2.1 children per woman) in 1991 and quickly fell further to 1.522 in 1998. After 1998, the data starts to look strange. Fertility, we are to believe, stopped falling in 1998, despite ever rising wealth, education and urbanization — all factors directly correlated with lower rates of reproduction. In fact, the rate supposedly increased by more than 15 percent from its low in 1998 to 2012. This makes no sense. Not only is this rise completely counter to experiences throughout the world, it is strongly against what happened in culturally similar societies in East Asia. Furthermore, China maintained its one-child policy through 2013. A fertility rate over 1.5 implies either a majority of women were having two children or a substantial number of women were having three or more children. And natural decrease has not been balanced by immigration — according to publicly available data, China has had a net outflow of migrants every year since 1960. The gathering demographic erosion of China is not some historical curiosity. It implies a fast-aging population with less dynamism and an increasing social welfare burden. Shifting demographics removed Japan as an economic competitor to the U.S. in the 1990s, and the same dynamic is at work against China. China's average age is already higher than that of the U.S. China remains a dangerous county. American officials and President Trump must understand that opening up China to U.S. exports is not a very good trade-off. Increasing demographic and economic pressures are likely to make China more aggressive in the near-term. Auguste Comte once said; 'Demography is destiny.' For China, that destiny — aging and economic atrophy — is here, and it is a serious problem for China and the world. But determining how to handle it requires an embrace of facts over official fictions. Keith Naughton is co-founder of Silent Majority Strategies, a public and regulatory affairs consulting firm, and a former Pennsylvania political campaign consultant.
