GABI as a model for the Second China Shock

Geoeconomics meet biogeography

One of the great puzzles of biogeographic history is associated with the Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI). North and South America had been separated for 65 million years. During that period of mutual isolation, the fauna of the two continents diverged dramatically. When the Isthmus of Panama was formed 2.7 million years ago, it created a land bridge across which species migrated north and south. Initially, there was no asymmetry. The faunal exchange was balanced: northern and southern taxa expanded their ranges across the land bridge at roughly equal rates (Webb 1976). Diversity increased on both continents. Then something quite interesting happened. South America saw the rapid diversification of northern migrants. Today, the descendants of northern migrants account for more than half of all genera of land mammals in South America (Webb and Marshall 1982). In North America on the other hand, little or no diversification took place. In fact, none of the South American migrants diversified above the species level. Why?

We find a very similar puzzle in the much more recent Columbian exchange. Old World species, domesticated and commensals, were wildly successful in the Neo-Europes. “The regions that – today export more foodstuffs of European provenance – grains and meats than any other lands on earth,” Crosby noted of the Neo-Europes in Ecological Imperialism, “had no wheat, barley, rye, cattle, pigs, sheep, or goats whatsoever five hundred years ago.” Meanwhile, indigenes of the New World found little success in the Old World. This is manifest in the dozens of Old World pathogens that annihilated New World populations, while the only known instance of successful ‘reverse migration’ of a pathogen is Treponema pallidum pallidum, the bacterium that causes syphilis. This striking asymmetry is true of all fauna. Why??

These great biogeographic puzzles have a single explanation. Webb (2006) argued that, for the GABI, “the most cogent general hypothesis may be that the northern groups that spread into South America had a long, wide-ranging history not only in North America, but also before that in Eurasia. This cosmopolitan background strongly contrasts with the long Cenozoic isolation experienced by the pre-GABI South American fauna.” More generally, Wilson describes the asymmetric advantage of the ‘World Continent’ (i.e., Afroeurasia):

The World Continent . . . has tested more evolutionary lines, built tougher competitors, and perfected more defenses against predators and disease. This advantage has allowed its species to win by confrontation. They have also won by insinuation: many were able to penetrate sparsely occupied niches more decisively, radiating and filling them quickly. With both confrontation and insinuation, the World Continent mammals gained the edge. (Wilson 1992, quoted in Webb 2006.)

I believe we can generalize this thesis. In particular, there is no reason why the asymmetric advantage should only apply to Afroeurasia as a whole. We already know that island biography—one of the best studied areas of biogeography—is an extreme case. Biotic exchange with islands is always asymmetric: islands are constantly colonized from the mainland, almost never vice-versa.

(According to the original model of MacArthur and Wilson (1967), depending on island area and distance from the mainland, islands have a dynamic equilibrium where the rate of species immigration equals the rate of species extinction, resulting in a relatively stable number of species. The evidence for the original hypothesis is mixed, but that need not concern us: the evidence for the striking asymmetric of island-mainland biotic exchange is dispositive.)

Between these two extreme cases—Afroeurasian primacy at the world level and mainland primacy at the micro level of offshore islands—should we not expect a similar deep pattern that gives the advantage to the mothership, so to speak?

We know that the genus Homo originated in Africa. And the continent remained the mothership, the center of gravity of the genus, right through the three or more out-of-Africa range expansions of Homo; with the continent accounting for a larger population of hominin than the rest of the world combined.

Around the time H. sapiens emerged two hundred thousand years ago, there were many other species in the genus, with Neanderthals endemic to western Eurasia, and Denisovans endemic to eastern Eurasia. The success of H. sapiens outside Africa, the fact that our species expanded out of Africa and Neanderthals and Denisovans did not expand into Africa, is well explained by this general hypothesis of the asymmetric advantage of the mother ship. The mother ship not only had greater genetic variation, it also had a dramatically larger population. It also had a more potent pathogen package. The similarity with the Columbian exchange is striking. So, perhaps the deep explanation of H. sapiens’ triumph is simply that it had the asymmetric advantage of a species from the mothership/central region over species or subspecies located on the periphery of the genus’ range. Indeed, this asymmetry was already understood in the heroic days of population genetics.

I believe that we can push this explanatory frame even further. Indeed, we can push it beyond biogeography. Specifically, what I have in mind is the Second China Shock. The Western world is shocked at the rapidly growing sophistication of Chinese advanced manufacturing and technology. Western auto firms seem to have thrown in the towel in the face of Chinese EVs. No one is even suggesting that competing with the Chinese on solar panels is possible at all. The one thing that the Biden team seized on as an enduring advantage—chips and generative AI—has now been conclusively shown to be no such thing. As Ritwik Gupta, an AI policy researcher at Berkeley, notes, “there is no moat when it comes to AI capabilities.” Ultimately, “China had a much larger talent pool of systems engineers than the US,” so whatever advantage the Biden team wanted to lock in is a wasting asset.

Many Western scolds, particularly those obsessed with the trade balance and sympathetic to protectionist voodoo like Michael Pettis, have tried to explain the Second China Shock as a result of heavy-duty state subsidies. But as David Flicking has shown so compellingly, there is simply no evidence for this hypothesis.

What explains the Second China Shock is instead a combination of consistent policy guidance (in sharp contrast to the American yoyo and EU dithering), cutthroat competition where ‘everything eventually descends into a price war’ (instead of a handful of monster firms like the US), and what Kyle Chan describes as ‘the coevolution of overlapping tech-industrial ecosystems.’ It’s what they say about New York: “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” Any firm that survives the hypercompetition of the Chinese home market, and keeps pace with the tech-industrial coevolution in China, is already well on its way to conquer the world.

The arrival of hypercompetitive Chinese firms on the world market looks very much like the arrival of World Continent fauna on the periphery: they have ‘tested more evolutionary lines, built tougher competitors, and perfected more defenses … [allowing them to win] by confrontation.’

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References.

Webb, S. David. “The great american biotic interchange: patterns and processes.” Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 93, no. 2 (2006): 245-257.

MacArthur, Robert H., and Edward O. Wilson. The Theory of Island Biogeography. Vol. 1. Princeton university press, 2001.

Wilson, Edward O. “Biodiversity: challenge, science, opportunity.” American Zoologist 34, no. 1 (1994): 5-11.

Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge University Press, 2004.