China isn't an Imperial power. China's power comes from its internal scale. China isn't exploiting African countries; it's was true before any external Chinese investment that African countries were unable to develop themselves. The Chinese aren't doing anything like Belgium.

This is why "the West" is on such terrible footing. Everyone from the EU's @Lagarde to the US's @SecPompeo to Discord's @AlthusserHIVcum — the West —looks at China's scramble for Africa and sees a 'peer' civilization contesting a land for its material resources.

Except...

The PRC doesn't exist via ethnic domination. They're all Han. They're in such a powerful globa position bc there's billion of'em (a real 'them', not a political one).

You can't replicate this via Empire— @AlthusserHIVcum ultimately wants @mattyglesias 's One Billion [Nationals].

But we can already look at a place which will never be an aligned, capable polity if it 'unites' a billion people for the purpose of chasing Scale. It's called Africa.

This reveals what the actual formula of global power is;

Global power = f(Unity, Capability, Scale)

The British Empire was powerful bc its war planners, industrial minds, and aristocrats had tCapability. What they lacked in Scale they made up with a large Empire—the Commonwealth. The disasters for Unity that followed need no telling.

The Atlantic Charter, NAFTA, the EuroCoal & Steel Commission—these prefigurations of the EU (and of' touted N. Am. Union) commit the same error as the British Empire relying on Sepoys and Coolies (and Whigs sympathetic to Rebels).

You're grafting lemons into an apple orchard.

Why do so many Euroskeptics feel sympathetic to BeNeLux, or Visegrad Group, or occasionally pleasant fantasies of 'Pan Germania'? Bc they intuitively know Scale is best achieved in tandem with Unity; doing so otherwise invites ever more discord, sand in the gears of Capability.

This is why *colonial* Empire is stupid and fatal. What you are inherently doing, even if you don't allow a single colonial foreigner into your domain, is ensuring that your economic life will be built upon an outsourcing of labor, and an external resource dependence.

Be it the Ukrainians or the Afrikaaners, any people who want to survive have to realize the way forward is BEING SELF RELIANT.

The motivating force of enslavement, colonialism, and imperialism, is the extraction of ease from other people.

And this is where decadence comes.