What's Going to Happen to East Asia as Civilization Begins to Collapse?

In this video, we analyze what the future may hold for East Asia as global civilization starts to collapse. We discuss China's precarious economic position and how their social credit system and COVID policies indicate preparation for maintaining control through collapse. We explore scenarios for Japan and Korea being taken over by cults or other authoritarian groups. We look at the importance of semiconductor manufacturing and evaluate the future prospects for Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and more.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] So, you might say, well, why am I still kind of bullish on China? One, they can force population which is going to be relevant for whatever comes after they pass through the eye of the needle, the collapse.

But also they have set up their entire system. That's what the social credit system is. That's what the constant monitoring is. That's what the money that the government can track is. Why did they do these COVID protocols? If it put them in such a dangerous position, vis a vis their existing economy, because it was all a plan

Simone Collins: for their They were preparing for collapse.

Yes,

Malcolm Collins: they were preparing to maintain their existing government systems in a collapse. A total economic collapse. I

Simone Collins: mean, like, if that is true, that is pretty baller on their part. Well,

Malcolm Collins: what it means is they will have something that a lot of the world doesn't have, which is not a competent government.

The Chinese government is not competent. It is anything but competent. It is wildly incompetent. But at least... A government that is capable of becoming competent again, a government that is capable of disseminating some of the hard [00:01:00] policies that can culturally unify a geographic region, increase its fertility, and maintain some level of isolated technophilia.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! We have done two previous episodes on what is going to happen as civilization, as we understand it, begins to collapse. As we have stated in the previous ones, it will collapse for one of two reasons. Either population collapse, as we've said, you know, Historically speaking, the economy has risen around the world for the past 500 years or so, because the number of consumers and the number of producers was growing exponentially.

We are about to hit a world in which the number of producers and number of producers, consumers, at least the ones who have high economic productivity, are declining exponentially. And we have leveraged every layer of our economies, which was great in times of growth, but in times of scarcity will lead to economic collapse.

Or AI fixes it, but AI also frees the bourgeoisie from the proletariat meaning that the wealthy within our society will, [00:02:00] increasingly become more wealthy and will increasingly become concentratedly wealthy and will use that wealth as systems begin to collapse to protect themselves from the masses.

And that means the masses, again, will experience economic, uh, positive or, or, or what's the word I'm looking for here?

Simone Collins: Depravity? Disempowerment. Economic disempowerment.

Malcolm Collins: Economic disempowerment of which we have almost never seen. And possibly just

Simone Collins: economic, also economic isolation. Yeah. And

Malcolm Collins: as we pointed out, in a lot of the world, what this is going to look like is not like moving back to the developing world.

It's not like we will live like we're in a developing world. It will be much worse than that. It will be a developed society that is collapsing. Which if you want to look for a good example of that on the global stage, you are looking at what it's like to live in South Africa today. That is what most of the world is going to be like within our children's lifetimes.

But this is the western world, and when I say the western world, I'm actually including a lot of the world. Russia, India, places like that. The one place that is really going to [00:03:00] buck this pattern is East Asia. But East Asia is going to buck it for reasons that may be equally dystopian. Yeah. So this is very interesting South Africa may also end up bucking it, but we, you can watch our video on Africa and a pronatalist system in the future.

We really don't know what's going to happen to Africa. We have limited experience there, but most of us have lived for extended periods of time in East Asia. So we have a much better understanding of East Asian cultures and how they are reacting to this. Mm hmm. So the country that matters most for where East Asia is going in regards to all this is China.

We can already begin to see China's reaction to rapidly falling birth rates, which is a restriction of, so, so first they just tried to force people. They were like, okay, get out there, have kids. We're telling you have kids. And people said, no. And China was like, oh, this hasn't happened before. Okay, well, we will restrict your access [00:04:00] to vasectomies.

We will restrict your access to abortions. And you're going to see what, what happened, you know, with the one child policy. If you look at, like, the year without a, what was it, a year, or was it a summer without a... birth or something like that. It was this region where they go, we're having a summer without a birth in this region because we're so good at following the communist party's orders.

And what they really just did was forced abortions on everyone who got pregnant and like murdering people and it was horrifying. And if you want to learn more about it look up other videos on it. It is almost as gruesome as you can conceive. Now what we are likely to have is similar things. The, the summer where every woman gets pregnant, how does that happen?

Well, you get inseminated when you go to a doctor's visit, you get inseminated When you, when you get the flu, you get inseminated. There are so many ways that they could fix this, if they really have to, is the way that the, the CCP thinks. And they could even do, you know, birthing facilities. They could do all sorts of things that shows sort of a top down thought process that we wouldn't even consider in the West.

Now, Before [00:05:00] they get to this, they're going to have to go through the needle, which is complete economic collapse. The Chinese system, and we can do a different video on this, is so fucked, it's almost impossible to describe how fucked the Chinese system is. A lot of people are like, well, no, it's just their demographics.

It's not just their demographics. They get something like 83 percent of their energy needs inputted, and like 86 percent of that are coming from the Middle East. That means that they're going around, like, all of these people who hate them. Like India, and through, like, the Strait of Malacca, which could easily be blockaded.

Or like, it's, it's, they are in an incredibly vulnerable international position. Worse than that, they don't even produce their own food. The food they do produce is they don't even produce their own phosphates for that food. So they wouldn't even have the same food production they have now if they were blockaded.

Oh, and on top of that, and they don't even need to be blockaded. You just need to have the [00:06:00] beginnings of a collapse of a globalist system, which we are already beginning to see, which is what happens in this future. On top of all that they don't even have water, like, they, they have water in some parts of China, not other parts of China, there's a great video on it that I'm gonna link to here on China's water situation, but something like, 96 percent of their water is just unusable because it's so polluted and this is a huge problem.

When their current energy needs, like their current energy production within the country is mostly coming from coal, which requires lots of water to make work. So, and then they require water to grow their own crops, which they can't even grow.

Ah, I almost forgot to mention there. Huge. infrastructure problem. to learn more about this topic i check out the video china has a debt problem three times larger than ever grand by economics explained

Malcolm Collins: And then their, their whole housing situation, which...

Okay, I'm going to quickly touch on this because a lot of people don't know what's going on with the housing situation and why it's so much worse than individuals think it is. So, something like 76 percent of [00:07:00] all of China's wealth is in their housing market. Why is that? Because that has been the most stable of all of the markets within the Chinese economy.

You know, historically... Companies have in the stock market has been really up and down because they can randomly be interfered with with the state, but the state cannot interfere with the housing market in a way which would cause it to collapse, or at least historically, it couldn't. Why couldn't it?

Because when the communist party took power, what they did? Was they said, okay, we're nationalizing all property, all land in the country. And then what ended up happening is the Chinese. I said, if you want to understand how the Chinese system is, is modeled, it's kind of like states, but they're called provinces like you would have in the U S but in the U S a lot of federal tax dollars go back down to states to help pay for things that's not true in the Chinese system and the Chinese system.

The provinces really have to pay for everything local themselves. And the federal tax dollars go to big federal national projects. But so it turns out that these states are not good at collecting taxes. Anybody who knows historically, that's the sign of an empire that's about to collapse. So [00:08:00] there's something like, estimated they're only collecting like 3%, 3.

5 percent of the taxes they're supposed to be collapsing. This is really in line with like a, a non functioning civilization. But anyway so how do they make up for this? What they do is they rezone land that is on the outskirts of urban centers as urban land, which allows them to sell it, because rural land is still owned by the people in China.

And then they sell them through debt that's taken out. That's not supposed to be taken out by these like secret holding codes. You can look into this more, but essentially they are supplementing, not having tax income with tax income, with land sales at the provincial level, this can make up like 33 percent of like a provinces, like ongoing operating expenses, which means that is if the.

Real estate situation in China collapses, which it's going to, and it is. Also their ability to get government revenues also collapses. To an extent that is not easily replaceable with tax revenues. [00:09:00] In addition to all of this, their like whole economic infrastructure, their whole reason for existing on the global stage, was as a bit globalist, multi country supply chain. So they would do one part within a globalist, multi country supply chain. Well, with COVID, they showed that they would just like close their ports, close their factories, and you're increasingly seeing them do stuff like this, which means that they are no longer useful as a player in a multi party supply chain, because you block just one step.

Even if you're like one of a hundred steps, you've blocked the entire supply chain, which means that if you're doing anything in China and now needs to be lateralized in China now for. minor, minimal economic problems when they block supply chains. The problem is, is that China can't do any advanced technology.

They just suck at it. Even hallway's newest chip looks like it's probably based in Taiwan. They're pretending like they're making it locally, but that's wild. That like China can't even make it chips for its own phones. Like the main thing it's doing. They just do not have this technological capability.

 So anyway and as to why they [00:10:00] don't have this technological, they had this huge project where like they were trying to do like simplistic things, like just make their own pencils that didn't suck. Like this was a huge project in China for a long time. Pencils. There was a pencil campaign. Yeah, there was a big pencil campaign that was like, I think up to like 2015 or 2016.

So recent. Wow. To just find out how to make competent pencils.

I'm at ballpoint

pen sorry about that

Malcolm Collins: They, they, they actually. Really kind of suck at this and worse than all of this is that if you're going to set up a new part of your supply chain, it's like always cheaper to do in Mexico now if you're a U. S. company because labor is less expensive in Mexico now.

So why would you do it in China? So they've lost their like economic resendetra. Their entire system's a house of cards. They are geopolitically incredibly vulnerable. All of this is painting this, this horrible, horrible, horrible picture for China. And some people are like, yeah, but they have like good battery supplies and it's like, yeah, but that doesn't increase their economy.

Okay, they need to find ways to increase their economy if they're going to economically grow that just slows the speed at which they are [00:11:00] declining, which is going to be catastrophic. All right. So, you might say, well, why am I still kind of bullish on China? One, they can force population which is going to be relevant for whatever comes after they pass through the eye of the needle, the collapse.

But also they have set up their entire system. That's what the social credit system is. That's what the constant monitoring is. That's what the money that the government can track is. Why did they do these COVID protocols? If it put them in such a dangerous position, vis a vis their existing economy, because it was all a plan

Simone Collins: for their They were preparing for collapse.

Yes,

Malcolm Collins: they were preparing to maintain their existing government systems in a collapse. A total economic collapse. I

Simone Collins: mean, like, if that is true, that is pretty baller on their part. Well,

Malcolm Collins: what it means is they will have something that a lot of the world doesn't have, which is not a competent government.

The Chinese government is not competent. It is anything but competent. It is wildly incompetent. But at least... A government that is capable [00:12:00] of becoming competent again, a government that is capable of disseminating some of the hard policies that can culturally unify a geographic region, increase its fertility, and maintain some level of isolated technophilia.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but I don't really get that impression that that's the direction they're moving in. I see a lot of efforts to subdue the population and control the population and maintain, you know, for those who have power, maintain their position.

Malcolm Collins: That is all true. But that is going to be infinitely better than the religious extremism that is going to dominate the rest of the world.

Right,

Simone Collins: but I don't see how that, I mean, unless they have some sort of elite... Separate, highly educated, technophilic, suddenly

Malcolm Collins: innovative. Yeah, so this is also important to note. So a lot of people are like, yeah, but won't China like start genetic selection, genetic engineering? No, China is really resistant to all of these.

People who ask this stuff and expect East Asian countries to engage with this technology do not understand fundamentally how conservative East Asian countries are. They are. [00:13:00] more conservative, like, like a small C level than probably anyone or any cultural group you have met. They are more conservative, for example, than ultra Orthodox Jewish communities.

They are more conservative than Amish communities in the ways that they engage with cultural technologies. They will, it seems very unlikely to me that they will engage with these technologies. thEy, if anything, will go back to something that looks more like the imperial exam systems. They will go back to a model that is based on old Chinese empires.

But what is important and what I am... It's not great, but it's not going to look like what we are going to see across the West, which is small, stable, technophilic havens surrounded by religious extremists who hate them and want to kill them. China is just going to be like a large economically depressed region.

That is finding a new stable state for itself, and it will take a while to find that as China always does, [00:14:00] but as it begins to find something that works, it will begin to come back as a major and unified play. This has huge implications for all of the countries around it. One, we're going to talk about Taiwan and we'll do another video on whether China would attack Taiwan or anything like that, but if Taiwan leaves the globalist economy, The globalist economy is kind of, because they are the only ones who can produce a lot of the chips that are used in like everything.

Yeah, for now. Everything. Like it is almost kind of weird that no one else has figured out how to produce these chips at the scale of Taiwan. They produce a huge chunk of the chips we use for almost everything in the world. And if things went down in Taiwan. There are only a few countries that could even supply themselves with chips.

China isn't one of them. Okay. I'm just saying that right now, Korea probably could. And so, it would make sense for the U S to maintain a tight alliance with them. [00:15:00] Japan probably could, the U S could to a lesser extent very few countries in Europe could I know that The UAE has looked into building technological capability on this front.

Israel could probably but very few countries could.

To clarify, I'm not talking about existing capacity for advanced semiconductor manufacturing. I'm talking about having the human capital to build that or the the investment capital and will to build out things like that so i mean if the chips were shut off which countries could conceivably begin producing them themselves after you know like eight 10 year investment in

Buddha period

Malcolm Collins: And this is just really meaningful if you're thinking about the future of a de globalized world and what partnerships matter. In the past, the if you've ever played like a game of Civ and like a new resource unlocks like iron or uranium, and you're like, God, I've got to make sure I have a good alliance with a country that has some within their borders.

It's going to be the same way with people who can produce these advanced[00:16:00] silicon chips. Especially if Taiwan leaves the world stage. Okay. But now what happens with Japan and Korea? Their, Korea's fertility rate is desperately low. I do not think this means that Korea will cease to exist. I think it means that some subgroup within Korea is going to replace the existing population.

This could be an immigrant population or a religious extremist population within Korea. One thing that people don't know about Korea who like don't know Korea is Korea is great at cults. They are a mass exporter of cults. They have exported many cults. The Moonies, for example, came from Korea. And they, they create really good cults.

When I say good cults, I just mean that they are internally consistent. I expect the future of Korea, when we say what's going to be, it will be a single cultural unit, which will make it very different from other countries around the world. But it will be run by a single, what we would today think of as a, a high fertility cult.

Now, whether that cult is technical. Phobic or technophilic is yet to be seen. If it is technophilic, it will be one of the largest [00:17:00] players in world history. And so that could be really interesting. Another,

Simone Collins: yeah, I, I, I could see interesting with Japan, like I, I visited what you could describe as, as like cult complexes in Japan.

And they feel very different. From mainstream Japanese culture and also a lot more prenatalist. They're not currently technophilic, to my knowledge, but they totally could become

Malcolm Collins: technophilic. When you're familiar with like their, their cultural ethno groups in Japan that are based around the descendants of samurais that believe you need to have something like...

Yeah. And they still hold to these practices. And so they have really high fertility groups.

I should clarify here that this is not the dissonance of all of the same right here in this group. It is a small, small group in Japan that would best be called a cult by outsiders as all groups that, that culturally extremely differentiate from mainstream society are often called. If they are considered youngish.

Now, clearly this group takes inspiration. From what they define as their heritage however who's to say [00:18:00] how many of them are actually from those samurai families

Malcolm Collins: So what we might actually see by Japan, Weebs fantasy is it gets taken over by the descendants of the Samurais. aNd they have, yeah, basically a, a martial unified Samurai empire of a country. Which again makes it very different from a lot of the Western world.

And so you can say, why? Are they able to do this? Why aren't they falling apart in the same way the western world is falling apart? The core reason is that they are basically already city states. Japan is a city state and Korea is a city state. A huge portion of each country's population, and an increasing portion of each country's population, is based around the metropolitan centers of each country.

And so is their economy, so is everything that they're building, which makes it Easier to culturally consolidate especially when everyone around them is so hostile to them. So that is the direction I think that those countries are going. If you look at what's the word I'm looking for here?

Indochina [00:19:00] and

 Oceania not including australia

or new zealand

Malcolm Collins: Those are the two areas, like Indonesia and stuff like that, you know, Indonesia is going to be a really big player in the future but how they're a big player isn't clear to me, they could be won by a technophobic population, Singapore obviously is, is really well set up for this haven state world that we're entering into that we've described in other videos, I think they're going to be a very large player and if Israel ends up getting taken over by technophobic populations.

The, the number one contender to be the core linchpin in the network of havens is going to be Singapore. If they can get their act together pronatalist wise, which I suspect they will be able to, because the government there. Is, is saying

Simone Collins: what I thought you were going to talk about is, is the, I think, you know, when it comes to, we've, we've talked about corporations producing humans like essentially corporations, either through, you know, surrogates that they, they hire to gestate their material as it were[00:20:00] or through artificial womb someday to start creating humans and then using them like in a corporate way for, you know, producing things for having their own sort of state.

I feel like if that is going to happen somewhere, it's more likely to happen somewhere in East Asia. I mean, I've always thought like China is on that

Malcolm Collins: list. Who does it? We don't know. I actually think it might be Korea. It could be. It could be. But you've also got to keep in mind how conservative these countries are.

Again, I say people expect them to be the ones that do the

weird

Simone Collins: genetic stuff. This is, this will happen in a somewhat post collapse state, I think, where like just People stop enforcing things that the attention to this sort of goes down. And then at some point, some really entrepreneurial person is going to just go for it, ask for forgiveness, not permission, or not even that, because at that point, if they're the ones.

With the humans, they're, they may be the ones with the power, so it won't even

Malcolm Collins: matter. Yeah, so I could see something like this being done by like a Korean tribal. Hmm. There's

Simone Collins: tribal system. Samsung [00:21:00] humans. Samsung humans. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: Samsung humans to live in your, your Samsung apartment. Yeah. Yeah. Another country.

So a lot of people are like, yeah, but what about the rising individuals today? Like we're invested in some countries like Vietnam, for example, I think they have a really positive future in the near term. But one thing we have to remember about countries like Vietnam is unfortunately these countries that are doing well because they're developing countries today of the globalist system we live in.

The countries that are going to be hit hardest. As the developing system begins to collapse are going to be the ones that are what we call developing countries today. You're getting

Simone Collins: free rent when it comes to the police, seize like open, open shipping channels and, and demand from other nations. So,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, so, so this is why Latin America is going to be hit so hard.

And one of the reasons why we just like, don't even talk about like, it does not matter economically in the future because Latin America has really tied itself to China. And as China collapses, specifically Southern [00:22:00] Latin America, Mexico is going to be fine, like they'll partner with the US, but if you're looking at, at, at South America specifically they rely too much on exports to China.

And the Chinese economy is going to stop like, what are they exporting? They're exporting like raw materials, like, metals and copper and stuff used in this building craze. And these buildings are empty. A lot of them, you know, they are trading like crypto. The, the, the reason why in China, an unfurnished building.

Room trades for more than a furnished room is because it is like an

unmolested like token. They are a tokenized unit and the reason why and I didn't really get to this like why is it? That the real estate always goes up It's because everyone knows that when the real estate does get begin to persistently grow down That's when the state as they understand it collapses And so if you can't take your money out of the country and the the stock market doesn't matter.

Well You If the money is going to crash [00:23:00] anyway. Because it will crash anyway, if the real estate crashes, because the government will crash, which is doing all sorts of funny things with their currency. Then you might as well put it in real estate. It's the only place that makes sense. So anyway anything else you wanted to talk about?

Simone Collins: No, but I hope East Asia does well. And I'd love to see things bounce back. I think the fun thing about them, and they're really like, this is the area to watch. This is like the, the geographic zone to watch because I think it's the most wildcard y one. Because it's seeing such a profound, at least like in, in China, Japan, South Korea, such a profound crash that like, it's so hard to like, who, who knows what's going to happen.

And I think that's really, it's both very dire, but also possibly exciting if you're like, well, I mean, you know, who knows they're, they're going to get really creative

Malcolm Collins: possibly. Yeah. And, and it, and it, it, it does make sense to keep alliances with most of these groups open while also correctly ranking their importance.

And I think one of the big problems with China today is people vastly overestimate [00:24:00] its importance to the future of the world. Yeah. It's just not that important. I remember I was, I mentioned this once on a call, was a, you know, one of these CCP, Chinese, whatever people, the high level person, and they got all mad.

They're like, China has risen many times and this is, you, you see, China has a long history and it always rises. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Listen to what you're saying. Why does China need to keep rising? It's because it keeps collapsing. And you are at the end of one of those cycles right now. If you look at history.

So yeah, China is just not that relevant from a future perspective. Taiwan is super, super duper duper duper duper duper relevant, like more, much more relevant. Actually, one of the funny predictions I have for the future, people want a really funny prediction for the future, is I believe there is actually a good chance if China doesn't successfully take Taiwan, that in 50 to 60 years, there could be a real possibility of Taiwan taking China.[00:25:00]

Just because they will be economically so much more productive than China, so much more important to the world stage and China itself, there is a small chance, we've talked about all the systems they've put in place to allow the system to collapse while still maintaining centralized control, but that that centralized control falters or you end up getting fights within the CCP, which ends up subdividing the country as has happened before in Chinese history, everybody knows about the warring states period or the three kingdoms or the You know, and this weakens them enough that Taiwan can come in and begin to take them one at a time, which could happen.

That would be an interesting twist of fate. Anyway yeah. Any other thoughts? No. Love you. Love you too.

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