China is eating the world

https://apropos.substack.com/p/china-is-eating-the-world

by sg5421 • 11 months ago

237 528 11 months ago

apropos.substack.com

skeptrune4• 11 months ago

Sounds good, but reads surface level to me.

I'd be interested to see something with more detail and citations. Or maybe even a rebuttal piece.

B1FF_PSUVM• 11 months ago

Perhaps a pretty picture to tide you over while waiting for your requirements to be met?

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-top-countries-by-ann...

zemvpferreira• 11 months ago

Better yet is to book a plane ticket. I haven’t been in China since ~2015 and already back then it felt inevitably advanced. I’m hoping to go back soon to see the future.

drake992• 11 months ago

China has a 240-hour visa-free transit policy for foreigners. Most major cities have direct flights—come and see China! (Remember to download Alipay in advance and link your Visa card.)

skeptrune4• 11 months ago

I should! It sounds like it would be an amazing and eye opening experience.

mysterypie• 11 months ago

Do you still get fingerprinted under the visa-free transit policy for foreigners?

I can accept a facial scan, but I draw the line at fingerprints and more invasive biometrics.

coldpie• 11 months ago

That's good info, thanks. I've been studying Chinese (Mandarin/Simplified) for about 2 years now, just as something to do on the bus for fun. It would be cool to go visit some day, maybe once my listening skills get up to an intermediate level.

WaxProlix2• 11 months ago

China poured more concrete in 2023-2025 than the US has throughout its entire history. China creates and consumes an order of magnitude more energy, and in an increasingly sustainable and cost-effective manner. China has largely moved towards internal market sufficiency, with internal demand outstripping external imports.

I'd be interested in a rebuttal piece too, because I don't necessarily want reality to be what it is. But it is, and it is.

_Algernon_• 11 months ago

How much of that concrete was poured into ghost cities?

skeptrune4• 11 months ago

Deliver growth, maintain order, forget the voting. It's spreading.

I think it's mostly this that makes me uncomfortable. I value Western ideals and am hopeful that they continue to spread.

stefan_• 11 months ago

Geez, you almost forget 20% of their youth are unemployed. And thats the number they dare report.

AnimalMuppet• 11 months ago

China creates and consumes an order of magnitude more energy

I'm gonna need a source for that one.

Best source I found quickly was Wikipedia, with 2023 data, showing China at about 2.5 times the US. That's surprising to me, but it's not an order of magnitude.

bigcat12345678• 11 months ago

Surface level?

What are depths you look?

Are you not familiar with China's relentless obsession with education and excellence? The cutthroat competition in business, the insane persistence in long-term planning and execution, the vast land of rich treasure underground, the emoumous long history of singular view of history and ancestry?

All these are traits of greatness.

And they have the brutal struggle from external invasion and internal turmoil since 1800s, those hard time breed generations of strong man, men who not only endure physical hardership, intellectual struggles, and spiritual torment, they embrace it, treat them as enjoyable and rewarding. They not only are instant in action, they are also ruthless in reflection. They dire to challenge the strongest coalition of power when they were just gained independence, they are also totally ok to subdue to the same super power when they decide so, without much of a mental conflicting, while still maintaining a unwavering commitment to greatness beyond anyone else's imagination.

China is bound to be the overlord of the nations on earth. That or it vanquish itself in its pursuit of that destiny.

What else do you need to know?

dingnuts• 11 months ago

why is there always pro-China messaging here and on Reddit? Every day there's another story about how China is eclipsing the West, but wake me up when the CCP changes.

China might be eating the world but the most obvious thing is the astroturfing.

bronson• 11 months ago

To eat the world, first you must eat social media.

potsandpans• 11 months ago

You're so used to the US and western world consent factories that even the suggestion of China doing well in an area has you on alert.

chvid3• 11 months ago

The zeitgeist is changing - public opinion is turning China friendly - Trump probably has a lot more to do with it than China itself.

fernvenue• 11 months ago

Good one, and I remember that somewhere (maybe Hacker News) I saw an article said that China is spending so much money and people to do these things, build some websites and make articles to change some "views".

DarkNova62• 11 months ago

Looking at what is going on in the US and how Trump is halfway there creating his own paramilitary force, China looks like a beacon of stability and progress.

panarchy3• 11 months ago

Probably because when I glance at pictures of cities in China I see amazing architecture and urban design that isn't rivaled by anything I see in the US.

And when I glance at pictures of cities in the US I see fascist armed goons terrorizing people and crumbling infrastructure

corimaith7• 11 months ago

But the urban design in China isn't anything special that other Asian cities have done, if not better and earlier.

So why this particular comparison with a single country to you? Tokyo, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore exceeded Western cities decades ago. Even today, Shanghai or Shezhen only is developed in certain areas, it does not reach the high level of urban development on ALL areas like in Hong Kong or Tokyo. And the mopeds or metro bomb checks aren't endearing either. It feels some people were either living under a rock for the last two decades, or they do have an agenda to push.

phtrivier2• 11 months ago

There are two options:

1. It's a massive PR campaigns. Things are actually _not_ that great in China, their numbers are completely fake, and it might collapse any time now.

But China manages to make people write the contrary.

Maybe they _are_ paying for all the Youtubers [1] [2] and journalists [3] who explain that US decisions in trade, science, energy, etc... are a huge gift to China.

This is not so impossible: that's basically what the Soviet Union tried to do until the 70s. Lots of people in the 60s were rooting for the USSR, hoping the West would copy them... Maybe the moon landing help deflate that bubble. And somehow, the shit hit the fan early enough, and demonstrably enough, that it all collapsed.

It does not have to be a conspiracy - maybe if you manage to publish cute numbers that tell a great story, people will repeat the story for you.

And we're so unfamiliar with China in the West, that we would not see through the BS.

2. You see it repeated a lot, because it's real. China is once again the dominant superpower in the world, they're ahead of us in every department and we will soon look like archaic peasants compared to them : basically the rest of the world history. It's just that we witness one of the small bumps where they were not at their best, and we assume it was "normal".

The problem is that China is building so much of the world that we rely on, I honestly can't think of good reasons to think 1 is true, and not 2.

Maybe Taiwan will be their Afghanistan ? (Sadly, it will only take us a couple years to know...)

That being said, I really wonder what's the way "out", if there is any, of dependency on China:

* just chill, accept that we'll never build anything ever, and buy chinese stuff ? * wait for demography [4] to become a real problem ? * rebuild a supply chain from the ground-up - curious where you start from. What's the first factory you rebuild ? * assume that it, too, shall pass, and that at some point China will make one of the blunders that authoritarianism allow ?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU8zYS43TRg&pp=0gcJCbIJAYcqI...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tNp2vsxEzk

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/world/asia/trump-science-...

[4] https://www.newsweek.com/china-faces-economic-blow-populatio...

phtrivier2• 11 months ago

I must have triggered the spirits of the algo, because right after commenting I stumbled on this take about how the collapse of China is inevitable, mostly because of demographics [1].

So, "we'll see", I guess ?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UltVl2Qlf6A

glimshe• 11 months ago

There is a certain group of people who love this narrative/propaganda for political reasons. I'm tired of it irrespective of whether it is true.

I'm ready to say "China is the greatest superpower ever and so much better than my US" so we can move on from this type of article.

churchill4• 11 months ago

You can simply ignore it, but you can't wish China and the progress they've made out of existence.

There are also Europeans who feel uncomfortable with the US having 1.5* Europe's GDP with less than half the population.

It's an extant truth and it'll become even more blatant as many Western countries struggle to do basic stuff like build out infrastructure.

vladms• 11 months ago

Generally true, although population ratio seem a bit off (EU population is 75% of USA population and USA GDP is 1.5 of GDP EU).

But GDP is not the only thing that matters. I personally (as European) care also about how the average people lives and in that matter I prefer the European style if that implies some difference in GDP.

Also, worth mentioning EU has a lot of countries that grew a lot because there were so far behind (the ex-communist ones) which means it was playing "catch-up". There are advantages to not having lately a war on your territory (USA)...

xg152• 11 months ago

Ignore the article and just read the last paragraph:

The tragedy isn’t that China is winning, it’s that the West stopped imagining better futures.

Or as a question: Why can't we do that stuff?

neptuneskeptic2• 11 months ago

China is winning bc they re-invest the profits into society. West is losing bc their profits are wired to some tax-paradise far away.

potato3732842• 11 months ago

Or as a question: Why can't we do that stuff?

Because over the past decades the interests that used to focus on growing the pie have pivoted to scooping up more of the pie (usually by getting government, or government adjacent entity, to pull some string).

Imagine the year is 1950/60/70/80 and you are a lobbyist for a construction product manufacture. What do you tell your paid off political to vote for? Stuff that lowers cost, creates more development, etc, of course. Because for every mil spent industry wide you know your employer nets $10, or whatever.

In 2025 you'd wine and dine a bunch of IBC jerks and insurance jerks and maybe even government jerks to get them to phrase things so that the industry is "incentivized" to use your employer's class of products, to the detriment of literally every participant in your sector for whom a different class of product would have otherwise been superior in their situation.

This sort of pivot to zero sum behavior has permeated damn near every class of economic activity, only in the most cutting edge spots of cutting edge sectors and the lowest margin, lowest sophistication, lowest security/moat sectors do you see anyone lift a goddamn finger to grow the pie.

immibis• 11 months ago

Because we have stage 4 terminal cancer. Cancer is when components of a system start working to their own benefit and the detriment of the system. If it spreads far enough without successful treatment, it leads to the destruction of both the system and its components.

yorwba• 11 months ago

Lots of things sound like good ideas that aren't. China has fewer checks and balances, so lots of things get built that sound like good ideas. This impresses people! Especially when they hear the huge numbers involved. E.g. the author gushes about "40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail that runs at 350 km/h."

So as a counterpoint, consider the former President of the Geographic Society of China arguing to that there was too much focus on impressing with speed and scale and too little big-picture thinking about door-to-door transport within cities, which would've benefited more from suburban light rail and buses https://www.pekingnology.com/p/china-massively-overbuilt-hig...

specproc• 11 months ago

California approved high-speed rail in 2008 to link LA and San Francisco for $33 billion. Costs ballooned; there’s still no service. The U.K. canceled HS2’s northern leg after years of overruns. Berlin’s new airport opened almost a decade late and billions over budget. Meanwhile, China built 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail that runs at 350 km/h.

Communism works.

dheera2• 11 months ago

You are conflating the communist-capitalist axis with authoritarian-democratic axis.

China is not a communist country in practical terms and hasn't been for 30+ years.

delta_p_delta_x2• 11 months ago

Communism works.

This isn't communism; this is a 'let's get shit done and not argue' mentality. Counterpoint: India is generally considered democratic and capitalist, has a similarly-sized population and a similarly-sized landmass, but has zero kilometres of proper high-speed rail.

jedberg2• 11 months ago

Well, authoritarianisim does. They were able to do that because they don't believe in property rights or worker protections. So it's a tradeoff.

chvid3• 11 months ago

Competent governance works.

mullingitover• 11 months ago

It’s not even communism, more “get shit done”-ism. They practice it, while the US has devolved into “sclerotic and psychotic”-ism.

casey22• 11 months ago

The fact that authoritarianism can build public projects faster has been well known for multiple millennia. But generally as people gain political power and expect more and more features you're rushed project won't scale to their demands and your project will be rewritten from scratch.

You are falling for hype metrics on a flashy MVP and filling in claims that were never made with fanciful imagination. Pushing code straight into production works great until it doesn't.

oezi• 11 months ago

Built by massive debt. One of the key questions for China is if this investment is profitable in the long term.

AngryData4• 11 months ago

Well modern China works, they don't really have all that many communist principles at work. Of course they never tried that hard in the first place, it was just the PR paint job used for one set of authoritarians to rise over others.

Teever5• 11 months ago

The House Select Committee on the CCP has been publishing the results of war games with China over Taiwan and the results are pretty dismaying.[0]

They show the US narrowly holding Taiwan at the cost of dozens of ship, hundreds of planes and the depletion of missile stockpiles that have lead times measured in months to years.

China dominates the shipbuilding industry[1] and can easily rebuild whatever ships they lose while the US will be dependent on South Korea and Japan to rebuild whatever they lose.

At the same time China is stockpiling commodities[2] and has come to dominate the solar and battery manufacturing industry[3] by building a tightly integrated and automated supply chain which will greatly reduce their dependency on imported hydrocarbons should war break out.

America can't even muster up enough artillery shells to fight a proxy war with Russia right now and is in complete and utter disarray politically.

You should be paying attention to these kinds of articles instead of dismissing them. The next few years are not going to be very kind to America.

[0] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites...

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-s...

[2] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/07/23/w...

[3] https://apnews.com/article/china-climate-solar-wind-carbon-e...

riku_iki14• 11 months ago

China dominates the shipbuilding industry[1] and can easily rebuild whatever ships they lose while the US will be dependent on South Korea and Japan to rebuild whatever they lose.

US builds military ships themself. Also, this will be very asymmetrical war: missiles which can destroy ship costs XM vs XXXM for military ship cost.

NitpickLawyer• 11 months ago

I think after the russian invasion we can kinda throw these kinds of simulations in the trash. They're not reliable and are published just to score brownie points by the parties that need them at that time.

Russia was supposed to be the 2nd military power in the world, and they couldn't do in 3 years what they thought they'd do in 3 days. A much smaller country, with a much smaller army, with surplus 90s western tech (at least in the first year) held against them. They didn't get air superiority at any point. Their navy was taken out of the warzone by a country with no navy of their own! And so on, and so forth.

China being a military superpower isn't credible. It sure wants to be seen as one, but an army is more than numbers on a pps presentation. They build tons of ships but do they have trained people to man them? (recent incident with PH coast guard making the cn navy have a kiss should be a hint)

Total displacement is meaningless when you put in conscripted, untrained people, no matter how motivated and patriotic they are (and I don't doubt they'd be).

Or their rockets that were found to have subpar prop mixtures. Or.. or.. or...

---

I say this as an european: the US isn't the best because they have big number goes up in military power. They do, of course, but it's much more than that. They have been actively involved in a conflict since the 2nd ww, with only a few years breaks. They have good training, practice in real world scenarios, and more importantly practice and are actively working with lots of allied forces.

Militarily, desert storm, iraq, syria and all the other coalition actions were "done" in 3 days. With air supremacy in 24 hours, usually. Watching the reports on how those operations unfolded always seems like a game of starcraft with cheating AI. You build turrets and cannons in your base, and the enemy brings stealth banshees and blink stalkers. It's not fair.

wing-_-nuts7• 11 months ago

It's not whether China has the ability to do so. It's at what cost. Any invasion of Taiwan would require an invasion fleet so large there is simply no way they would be able to hide it. The entire world would know about it well before it happened. The costs of invasion would be absolutely staggering, with little to no benefits. The CCP values the stability of their regime above all else. They're rattling sabers and trying to win concessions.

msabalau• 11 months ago

The point of wargames and the work of the committee is to find issues and address them, not so that one can panic about nonsense like China building ships faster than we can build missiles.

As noted, the result of the wargames was that China lost. That's not really the sort of result that the CCP would be looking for. They want stability. Losing a war, and a whole a bunch of young men, in a patrilineal society demographically warped by the CCPs one child policies ain't a recipe for stability.

China hasn't fought a war since '79. They probably shouldn't start learning how to fight again by trying an amphibious assault on an island that is mostly mountains, jungles, and cities. The US in '45 had more material advantages than the PRC ever will, and a lot of experience with amphibious assault, and they turned away from invading Taiwan to go to the incredibly costly invasions of the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, because as bad as that was, it was so much less difficult.

Note further that the wargames assumes that the fight is only between the US forces in theater vs a massed Chinese attack, because all the rest of the US military is dealing with "some other crisis".

America doesn't have great supply chains for building artillery shells, because they aren't important for our strategic focus China, and they weren't needed in quantity for our last military conflict, which was evidently about spending trillions of dollars ensuring that Afghanistan could have a woman's soccer team for a few years.

Just because the US can be more thoughtfully prepared doesn't that China is some unstoppable giant.

logicchains3• 11 months ago

It's absolutely propaganda. China's GDP per capita is around $15k while the US's is around $60k; China still has a long long way to go, decades at best, before the average Chinese person's standard of living is comparable to the average American's. And given the population aging/low birthrate problem is even worse in China than in the US, it's going to be a struggle to get there.

China simply has a population around 4x larger than America's, so even at a much lower level of development/standard of living it can still have a very big impact on the overall global economy.

loa_in_• 11 months ago

If you value money, and eventually exchange everything for money, you'll be left with money. China respects it's temples, traditions more than they respect money and that's where your measurements go wrong because the abstraction is very leaky.

tokioyoyo9• 11 months ago

I would highly suggest checking out China, before comparing GDP per capita. Or at least have close Chinese friends who live in T1/T2 cities.

China has a lot of problems, like a lot. But comparable QoL isn’t there. I’d say insane competition and work hours is probably the biggest problem for average person, from what I’ve heard from my friends, and browsing Chinese media.

like_any_other2• 11 months ago

What does "political reasons" mean? Not wanting to lose economic sovereignty and be in thrall to a foreign country? It's not losing some meaningless race to be #1 economy or China's prosperity that worries me - I welcome it. What worries me is that, unlike China, Western politicians seem entirely unable or unwilling to protect their native industries.

paradox4602• 11 months ago

The Soviets churned out almost identical propaganda, as does North Korea. The only difference here is there's a massive population of people (and bots) that parrot it ad nauseum across Western platforms, in ways that the cccp could only dream of

churchill4• 11 months ago

Funny how much stuff you can build when you're not spending insane amounts of money bombing farmers in the Hindu Kush, achieving full-spectrum dominance over everyone, or catering to entrenched interests.

Brown University's Costs of War project estimated that by 2021, all post-9/11 wars had cost $8T. When you factor in inflation since then, it easily exceeds $10T spent murdering farmers making $2/day in the Middle East. With nothing to show for it.

That's roughly a third of America's GDP/current debt wasted on making the world a measurably worse place.

DarkNova62• 11 months ago

Or when all the money goes to the 1% in a bottom-up scheme.

manoDev• 11 months ago

China's population is 4.2x larger than the US. If they concentrate in developing their own country and creating an internal market, they'll do well.

Meanwhile, US development strategy post-WW has been 100% based on projecting military [1], political [2] and economic [3] power on a global scale.

So war isn't just "spending", but trading off investment on your own country vs. extracting value from somewhere else. That's how you get large defense funding but not public health care.

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-every-known-u-s-mili...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

Gunax• 11 months ago

8T isnt really that much for America, especially over 24 years. And it's not like China does not spend on defense.

I would be cautious applying broad statements and simple causes. Often we take these opportunities to connect it with whatever pet issue we individually care about. That's why you can see people blaming everything from zoning policies to DEI.

AngryData4• 11 months ago

It is when you look at the bottom 50% of Americans who are struggling.

xixixao• 11 months ago

What worries me more than “authoritarian model works”, is the isolation. Absolutely seriously: What enabled the terrors of collonialism was the lack of understanding of shared humanity between the sides. What happens when China is big, strong, different, ultra-nationalist and some factor kicks it out of the “peace is the most advantageous path forward” mode? Imagine the military and economic dominance of US, but with Chinese superiority ideals instead of liberal-democratic ones (and even with those plenty of harm has been caused).

coliveira• 11 months ago

I don't worry about this even for a single minute, because the other scenario is much worse and more probable, i.e., "liberal-democratic" turn into fascism (something that already happened) and scale to a world-war for domination of "non-civilized" countries.

thefz• 11 months ago

No Starbucks, no McDonald's, no Western chains at all.

You'd be surprised by how much the rest of the world does not care about these things at all or even finds their presence degrading

aaomidi• 11 months ago

This is one of the biggest things I miss from Iran.

chvid3• 11 months ago

There are plenty of Starbucks and McDonald’s in China.

Avalaxy• 11 months ago

I would love to NOT have those chains in my country. Especially mac donalds, I associate with trash. Both trashy people, as well as literal trash laying on the streets.

vunderba• 11 months ago

100% agreed. Globalization pushes cities away from being centers of local culture and introduces the blandness of mass cultural homogenization.

More countries need to take a tip from Bermuda.

https://www.bermuda4u.com/faqs/mcdonalds-bermuda/

corimaith7• 11 months ago

The strongest cultural exporters are those that wholly embraced globalization but also engaged and built further on the ideas. China's cultural rise is precisely because they built on prior Japanese and American ideas.

So it's not bland, because what is the weight of a single culture to the combined contributions of a dozen. And through that, possibility is created, resulting in a far greater range of diversity than the traditions stuck in the past.

corimaith7• 11 months ago

Given that I do see alot of Starbucks in China and in many countries, I'm inclined to think a larger portion isn't so petty and do like having the option of Western products/lifestyle.

NoboruWataya• 11 months ago

I think they still need us to buy their stuff, though maybe less so than in the past. Many of the points the article is making are basically that they don't need to buy our stuff, but hasn't that always been the case? With a massive population and manufacturing base, and significant linguistic and technical barriers between them and the West, it's hardly surprising that they would build their own Google rather than importing ours.

I don't think of China as producing cheap crap, I think of it as producing everything. A lot of that stuff is cheap crap, I know because I bought it. But clearly they also produce high tech and high value goods.

I also don't think it's surprising or new that an authoritarian country can deliver material progress for its people. I think the same was true for the early Soviet Union and the fascist countries of 20th century Europe. Democracy's main selling point was never that it made us rich.

t-3• 11 months ago

Democracy's main selling point was never that it made us rich.

I don't know how old the capitalism/democracy conflation is, but it's definitely more than a few decades. The political and economic systems are inextricably linked in the minds of many.

4dregress• 11 months ago

How does this slop even get on the front page?

keiferski5• 11 months ago

China has built its own enormous internal market—its own tourism, its own brands, its own everything. They've turned inward not from isolation but from self-sufficiency.

Not sure how the title matches with this line at all.

In any case, these kinds of analyses always seem really shallow and historically ignorant to me. I can totally buy the idea that China will become a dominant economic player in the world, if it isn't already. This seems like an obvious, borderline mundane observation to make.

What would be more insightful is an analysis of China and the West that factors in three big things:

1. How the unique aspects of America basically make it impossible for the the country to be in the position China was in during the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is to say, a total disaster, beset by civil wars, colonial acquisitions, invasions, on and on. No matter how much China outcompetes America, I don't think it will ever be in that sort of situation. The military and national security state, plus the sheer amount of personal firearms, pretty much guarantees IMO that the US is basically impregnable from outside military interventions. 19th century China had neither of these things. And so I think you're inevitably going to have, at worst, a multipolar world, if not a directly bipolar one.

2. More broadly, how the cultural dynamics of the West led to the Reformation, Wars of Religion, Renaissance, and Industrial Revolution and to the West being the dominant power in the first place. And more importantly, if those cultural trends are still active, even if they are somehow dormant. If you don't factor these in, your picture of history is extremely short-term and basically dependent on contemporary predictions of the future. (See: predictions of Japan in the 1980s.)

3. And more recently, how the "enemy" of the Soviet Union prompted the US to behave more competitively and feel pressured to perform. See, for example, the Space Race. I don't really get the sense that China is anywhere near occupying the same place in the American imagination right now, and so there isn't much of a competitive spirit. There seem to be rumblings of one developing in the last decade, but it's still not quite there. If it ever develops, certainly it's going to be a factor.

seanicus3• 11 months ago

It's hard to imagine what could even constitute a modern Sputnik moment, but it's an interesting thought experiment. I just don't think that Americans care enough, and both countries are way more dependent on each other than the US and USSR ever were.

Caveat I've been wrong on pretty much every political prognostication I've ever made, so buy some defense industry stocks.

Maybe US gets really good at maglev trains and in reprisal China goes full throttle on inventing teleportation/hyperdrive tech?

breppp• 11 months ago

Full AGI is a pretty trivial example

keiferski5• 11 months ago

A fully functional moon base? Mars colony?

porphyra4• 11 months ago

How the unique aspects of America basically make it impossible for the the country to be in the position China was in during the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is to say, a total disaster, beset by civil wars, colonial acquisitions, invasions, on and on.

The US literally had a civil war in the 19th century. And judging by the current polarized political sentiments, I wouldn't be surprised if another one happened in my lifetime. But yes, I don't think anyone will be invading the US any time soon.

More broadly, how the cultural dynamics of the West led to the Reformation, Wars of Religion, Renaissance, and Industrial Revolution and to the West being the dominant power in the first place.

Prior to the Renaissance, the West languished for centuries in the dark ages and middle ages whereas China prospered during the Tang and Song Dynasty. So it clearly isn't something that's uniquely about, say, Christianity or chivalrous knights, that allowed the West to develop so well. Cycles of dominance like the Islamic Golden Age and stuff seem to be mostly driven by institutions and luck rather than fixed cultural traits. Probably what got the West to become the dominant power and industrialize was the development of scientific thinking, which translated to advantages in every respect such as ship navigation and making cannons, which then led to colonialism and extracting resources from every part of the world. But now everyone has scientific thinking, and if anything, China is embracing science a lot more while America is regressing back into superstitions (for example, the current United States Secretary of Health and Human Services is a conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist).

Also, you allude to Japan's stagnation after the 1980s, but I think that's largely due to policy, demographics, and external factors.

keiferski5• 11 months ago

The American Civil War was nothing like the Chinese civil wars of the 19th and 20th centuries. America industrialized almost directly as a consequence of the war, and in some sense it was an economic war of the industrial north conquering the agrarian south. Really not comparable to the chaotic situation that happened in China, with warlords, foreign interventions, etc.

And scientific thinking is very much a consequence of cultural trends in Europe, many of which were explicitly religious in nature.

_DeadFred_5• 11 months ago

Having been to both China and the American midwest (and living in a red state) China is WAY more superstitious. The US stuff is purely reactionary, not the bubbling up of some strong longly held cultural beliefs.

chrisco25517• 11 months ago

Also, you allude to Japan's stagnation after the 1980s, but I think that's largely due to policy, demographics, and external factors.

China has the same demographic problem that Japan has. It has a declining population and a lopsided population pyramid, made particularly stark by the implementation of one child policy many decades ago.

bryanlarsen5• 11 months ago

Before the Meiji Restoration or the unification of Mongolia, the economy and population of China dwarfed Japan and Mongolia far more than the economy and population of the US dwarfs Mexico.

It seems impossible to think that Mexico could conquer the US, but far more implausible things have happened in past history.

chrisco25517• 11 months ago

Strange tangent, but Mexico doesn't even have a top 30 military strength. The U.S. can project power to every corner of the globe. It not only outnumbers Mexico but it has a number of technological, geographical, financial, logistical advantages that Mexico is nowhere near competing with. In the distant past nations didn't even necessarily understand the full capacity of their competition. In modern warfare, we know our enemies capabilities and they know our capabilities, satellites leave little to the imagination.

Japan leapfrogged China by industrializing quicker than they did. Industrialization is an obvious force multiplier for an economy and military.

like_any_other2• 11 months ago

How the unique aspects of America basically make it impossible for the the country to be in the position China was in during the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is to say, a total disaster, beset by civil wars, colonial acquisitions, invasions, on and on. No matter how much China outcompetes America, I don't think it will ever be in that sort of situation.

Generals are always preparing to fight the previous war.. Look at China's actions (or the West's, for that matter). Rarely is it an invasion with guns and bombs (with the notable exception of the US Middle East policy). Mostly it's slow economic takeover. What good will guns do you, when to sell your wares, you need permission from a Chinese market owner [1], or when the only jobs are in Chinese-owned chains and conglomerates?

It won't be as bad, but it could be differently bad - for all the invasions China suffered, they are still today 91% ethnically Han-Chinese [2], in stark contrast to the dramatic demographic transformation of the US since 1965.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/chinas-jdco...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Ethnic_g...

supportengineer3• 11 months ago

> beset by civil wars

One of us has not been watching the news lately.

keiferski5• 11 months ago

Not even remotely similar to the chaos that was China circa 1800-1950.

watwut• 11 months ago

Personal firearms do absolutely nothing against foreign invation. They can amount to small scale terrorism and that is it

keiferski5• 11 months ago

There are 18 million veterans and 400 million firearms in the US today, in a peaceful situation.

runlaszlorun3• 11 months ago

They can amount to small scale terrorism and that is it

Or a large scale insurgency. Something millions of military veterans have (unfortunately) witnessed first hand.

AngryData4• 11 months ago

And? You don't need to win big set piece battles to win a war. Insurgencies have won over and over again because without the support of the local people, the occupying forces must continuously expend massive amounts of capital along with some of their own lives to maintain control. The people are what makes an area either valuable or expensive.

xg152• 11 months ago

The military and national security state, plus the sheer amount of personal firearms, pretty much guarantees IMO that the US is basically impregnable from outside military interventions.

I find that a bit naive.

First, as for the point about firearms, I honestly don't think this is very relevant for the ability of a state to defend itself. Lots of firearms in civil possession might make life harder for domestic police - because they have (at least in theory) some obligation to protect the state's citizens and their property, even those citizens with firearms. So they cannot arbitrarily overpower those people.

An invading army has no such qualms. Just have a look at the wars that are currently going on, or the US' own invasions in the past. They have rockets, drones, airstrikes, artillery, tanks and all the other goodies at their disposal and will generally avoid getting anywhere near where your firearm could hit them. They won't try to arrest you, they'll simply blow up your house.

The second point has merit: The US not only has the most powerful national military in the world, it's also the leader of the most powerful international military alliance. Not to mention it is still at the center of the global trading and financial system, as well as the internet. Because of those factors, a chance of invasion is nil.

But that's nothing uniquely American, it just reflects the amount of power America currently has. Britain was in a similar position two centuries ago and Spain before that. It might change again.

vdqtp3• 11 months ago

An invading army has no such qualms.
They won't try to arrest you, they'll simply blow up your house.

The point is, they'd have to blow up so many houses it's not viable.

delta_p_delta_x2• 11 months ago

Singapore, Dubai, Rwanda—they're all copying the Chinese model: authoritarian capitalism with good PR.

The author got one city in this list backward. China copied Singapore, through and through. Deng Xiaoping's state visit to Singapore was the catalyst and model for China's subsequent opening up and 'state capitalism'[1][2][3], where the party in power would have leverage and possibly ownership over both state- and privately-owned enterprises.

Singapore calls them 'GLCs', or government-linked companies, and they form the overwhelming majority of its GDP.

[1] https://www.nlb.gov.sg/main/article-detail?cmsuuid=6c7cb559-... [2]: https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/s... [3]: https://thediplomat.com/2023/12/looking-back-on-deng-xiaopin...

cholantesh• 11 months ago

Quite frankly, suggesting that the Gulf states are only now, thanks to the Chinese coming around to "authoritarian capitalism" and the importance of "good PR" seems a bit rich.

casey22• 11 months ago

China went from burning coal directly to becoming the world's solar panel factory.

You're phrasing make it sound like they aren't the largest coal consumer in the world. If they managed to genuinely leapfrog the west their manufacturing industry would be mostly electric. They are using the same unsustainable tech as the rest of us.

The same global pressures that affect every country will hollow out their supply and talent pyramids and there is no way around that short of just saying NO to slave labor

delusional• 11 months ago

The government we call authoritarian is delivering what Western democracies struggle to: stuff that actually works. Their infrastructure works. Extreme poverty collapsed. Life expectancy increased by 10 years. They can plan 20 years ahead while Western politicians can't plan past the next election.

This is such an America centric point of view. Plenty of central Europe is delivering longer life expectancy and better public infrastructure, without the authoritarian state (at least if you ask anybody but an American).

chrisco25517• 11 months ago

I mean both of these points are moot. China's life expectancy boosts are just the effect of coming out of poverty.

Meanwhile plenty of European countries have seen declines in life expectancy in recent years:

Austria and Finland: Largest declines (-0.4 years each). Estonia and the Netherlands: -0.2 years. Germany, Italy, and Latvia: -0.1 years

erxam2• 11 months ago

Europe only developed this way because of the immense ideological and moral pull the Soviet Union had over the populace.

Capital and the ruling classes feared revolutionary intent so much that they had no other choice than to give in and give people a good quality of life to try and stymie it. It's the Otto von Bismarck state welfare tactic.

Now that it's gone and revolutionary ideas have basically all but completely disappeared (China does not and probably will never have the same standing the Soviets did), they don't have to keep the façade up anymore. This is why everything has been decaying. Sooner or later all the 'advantages' and 'benefits' Europe has will wither away into nothingness.

wahern3• 11 months ago

Walking through the ancient towns another reality hit me: China doesn't need us anymore. These towns were packed with only Chinese tourists, I counted maybe ten Westerners the whole week. No Starbucks, no McDonald's, no Western chains at all.

What? New Orlean's French Quarter doesn't have McDonalds or Starbucks, either. And how is it shocking that a historical district in a province not internationally well known would have mostly domestic tourists?

China has built its own enormous internal market—its own tourism, its own brands, its own everything. They've turned inward not from isolation but from self-sufficiency.

Is this person completely ignorant about Chinese history? Precisely nothing has changed about China, the culture has always been like this, if only because they've always been so large. There's a reason they've always called themselves the Middle Kingdom (i.e. the center of the universe). Large countries are like this, generally. The USA is like this. Perhaps the author is American and that's why they're so shocked when they begin to see the world through others' eyes.

zknow• 11 months ago

I don't think many people realize what a historical aberation 20th century China was.

wahern3• 11 months ago

I'm not even sure the 20th century was an aberration. Yes, the 19th and 20th centuries saw outside influences (Opium Wars, WWII, Communism) triggering massive domestic changes, but those influences happened at the edges, geographically and figuratively. What was visible from the perspective of the average Chinese person was always, wholly Chinese.

I think the anti-colonial movement, like the social justice movement, gives a false impression to people about what it's like to be an "other". These movements bifurcate groups into oppressors and oppressed, and explicitly or implicitly the oppressed are cast as victims beholden to a world in which they have no agency, perennially always outside looking in. They're less than human; their humanity stripped in exchange for being cast as objects of virtue. It turns people into caricatures, so when you see "oppressed" people behaving normally--the same way "normal" people do, e.g. your local community--it can be shocking.

notahacker2• 11 months ago

The USA is like this. Perhaps the author is American and that's why they're so shocked when they begin to see the world through others' eyes.

Yeah, I'm a bit perplexed by this. You'll see local brands and local tourism dominate in many parts of countries like Spain or Thailand or Peru which don't even pretend to be self sufficient. No real surprise that US brands are a footnote somewhere with a different culture, especially when there's a billion people there and they make a lot of the stuff the West uses anyway.

AuthAuth3• 11 months ago

no when you go to countries like spain, thailand idk about peru but they are filled with american brands and people. To see no McDonalds in a tourist area is actually shocking.

junar• 11 months ago

I agree, that part seems like a weak argument.

Perhaps a more apt comparison is that China-based Luckin Coffee has far more locations in the country compared to Starbucks.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/12/china-us-br...

PedroBatista• 11 months ago

While I don't deny China is a big economy with areas where it's leading. This article reads a bit like cheerleading, which is fine. It's just not the whole truth.

Also: >prosperity without freedom, development without democracy, safety without expansive civil liberties.

So did the USSR in many places.

logicchains3• 11 months ago

The article is misleading. What matters when comparing economic systems is relative standards of living _per person_, and America's GDP per capita of around $60k is 4x larger than China's GDP per capita of around $15k.

The reason China's total GDP is high is because the population is so high, over a billion people. That's something the Chinese government deserves zero credit for because without the one child policy the population would be even higher; the Chinese government actively tried to suppress population growth.

As another point of reference, Taiwan's GDP per capita is around $34k. I.e. if you look past the propaganda, in empirical terms the average Taiwanese person's material quality of life is twice as good as the average mainlander's.

mewse-hn• 11 months ago

It didn't feel like cheerleading to me, the very section you quoted is pointing out the part that is most troubling about China's rise, that they seem to be doing it without western freedoms.

This is contrary to the ideology of the cold war that the market economy of the West won because of western liberties - freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, free elections. China's incredible transformation is happening without those things.

logicchains3• 11 months ago

China's incredible transformation

There's nothing incredible about a GDP per capita of $15k, less than half the GDP of Korea, Japan or Taiwan. Slightly less even than places like Romania and Turkey. The only thing impressive about it that China's population is so large that the absolute GDP can be high even when the GDP per person is low. But the purpose of a government/economic system is to improve the standard of living of its citizens, and by that metric China is far behind other East Asian nations.

Yeul2• 11 months ago

I think people like to overestimate just how much society cares about democracy and human rights. Many of us will trade it for peace and prosperity when push comes to shove.

jajuuka2• 11 months ago

There is a reason for the rise of the far right in the west. Fascism for sure isn't the answer though. It's taking all the wrong lessons.

porphyra4• 11 months ago

Once Deng Xiaoping did his reforms and opening up, it removed much of the impediments that Mao's CCP caused, and China was able to develop super fast. But recently I am a little concerned that Xi Jinping's rule is a bit of a return to some Mao-style authoritarian principles that are likely to hamper growth.

* Economic growth slowed down significantly under Xi Jinping compared to his predecessor Hu Jintao. Also, while Xi handled the start of the Covid pandemic well, he sort of fumbled the recovery afterwards with too heavy-handed quarantine/daily testing policies.

* China has demonstrated that it's super good at AI stuff, publishing lots of papers, having extremely talented engineers at Deepseek, etc, but after Deepseek stunned the world with the R1 model, subsequent models got heavily censored and languished in relative obscurity.

* China continues to have a brain drain of talented scientists and engineers to the US and other parts of the world. A large proportion of the top talent at Google, OpenAI, xAI, Meta, etc, are Chinese-American.

* From my anecdotal experience, many young people in China feel helpless and unmotivated due to the hyper-competitive environment and lack of opportunities. It is common to find healthy young adults who would rather "lie flat" than work. Together with an extremely aging population due to the one-child policy, this does not bode well for the future.

Anyway, I just wish China would just continue opening up, namely to get rid of the great firewall. In the age of information it is lame that information flow in and out of the country is so restricted. On one hand, as this article points out, the rest of the world is ignorant of the advances in China. On the other hand, the Chinese people are also ignorant of many things outside.

seanicus3• 11 months ago

That firewall isn't going away anytime soon. Americans are inundated with a deluge of foreign influence campaigns from a variety of foreign powers and no way China wants that pain revisited upon themselves.

yonisto• 11 months ago

Sure. This why they block google search, amazon and onlyfans. LOL.

The wall always had two functions, the obvious blocking from getting people in, but it also blocks from getting your people out

storus• 11 months ago

China did reinforcement learning at scale in the real world. They essentially dedicated a decade for exploration, inviting experts from all countries to some local area (each expert/country of origin combo in a different one) and developed it according to what experts advised. Then they evaluated the changes, took the best performing ones and went into full exploitation mode, spreading those lessons throughout the China. They also had a large part of Africa for additional experiments on what worked.

hnhn34• 11 months ago

but after Deepseek stunned the world with the R1 model, subsequent models got heavily censored and languished in relative obscurity.

I'm pretty sure this isn't what happened. DeepSeek just hasn't released a big model upate. But in the meantime, Qwen, Bytedance, Ziphu and Moonshot AI have released extremely impressive models, some of which are SOTA or close to it. The open source/open weight world is still in love with Chinese labs as they keep releasing cool stuff and filling the void left by Meta and Mistral.

freilanzer3• 11 months ago

Qwen3-Embedding is really good, imo. It allows me to release a global feature that would have been extremely difficult otherwise.

Sammi5• 11 months ago

None of these are SOTA in any benchmark I've seen. Some of them get in the top 10 or top 5 some times.

What these Chinese models have that is interesting is that they are much cheaper to run and they are open source. This has pushed the other closed source SOTA models to make all the big updates we have seen the last few months. I guess we can thank these Chinese models for creating some competitive pressure, which has pushed the forefront, but they aren't doing so by leading the forefront.

cpursley2• 11 months ago

You missed how they quickly caught up (even surpassed the west in some cases) in vehicle manufacturing, electronics like phones and 5G, drones. Where they haven’t quite yet, they are very very close.

neonrider2• 11 months ago

Anyway, I just wish China would just continue opening up, namely to get rid of the great firewall.

To become the next Rome, China would have to open up and let itself be infected by the rest of the world. It's a rite of passage, with no guarantee that it will have the constitution to endure the culture shock and the subsequent fever. How do you expose 1.4 billion minds to new perspectives, while also keeping everyone paddling in the same direction?

sys32768• 11 months ago

Now the author should write an article criticizing China while visiting there.

yonran• 11 months ago

Singapore, Dubai, Rwanda—they're all copying the Chinese model: authoritarian capitalism

I don’t know much about China, but I’m not sure the Chinese model of economic modernization today is much different than post-war US model that worked of defense-led capitalism, strategic resource stockpiles to maintain price stability, and strong antitrust. I think the Chinese economy is probably more free-market (in the sense that it is easier to start a business, and the Econ 101 model of pure competition that drives down prices applies to more markets) than the US is today.

magicmicah853• 11 months ago

I don't know much, so feel free to tell me if I'm wrong but a quick rebuttal of this article would point out how half of china's cities are sinking, their debt to GDP ratio was 300% before a GDP revision and they ignore international patents and intellectual property. I'm happy that China lifted their people out of poverty, though. Their achievements are certainly real.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68844731

https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2025/02/the-relationship...

https://www.hudson.org/technology/china-ignores-rule-of-law-...

ronsor• 11 months ago

ignore international patents and intellectual property

I'm no CCP shill, but I wish we'd do that too.

magicmicah853• 11 months ago

We'd be playing by the same rules in that case. And there are some companies that ignore that already. No AI company, to my knowledge, was built on ethically sourced material.

dheera2• 11 months ago

Also, ignore international laws about the internet.

No China website spews stupid GDPR popups. They don't listen to the EU, even if they have EU users. I don't think the US should, either.

I don't disagree with privacy laws, but GDPR popups isn't it, and the US should grow its own. Don't set precedents that other countries can just make up laws and you'll just blindly follow them outside their jurisdiction.

_DeadFred_5• 11 months ago

Yes, let's end all reward for intellectual development other than directly through commercialization of products. That will help our society grow/think/learn.

riku_iki14• 11 months ago

their debt to GDP ratio was 300% before a GDP revision

government debt is 83% of GDP vs 123% for US as per: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/GG_DEBT_GDP@GDD/CHN/...

they ignore international patents and intellectual property

so what? They got what they want and won multiple markets without major consequences.

_DeadFred_5• 11 months ago

Now include state (not notional) debt, and state/national owned institutions.

Fricken3• 11 months ago

I recall, in my final year of high school, in 1995, reading a Sunday op-ed about China's rising prospects. The article predicted that China would surpass the west in the mid-2020s. I never forgot that prediction, and, like clockwork, here we are 30 years later. It's astonishing.

magicmicah853• 11 months ago

I've been watching the "China is going to fail" articles every few years and they just keep winning. The only option left for other superpowers is to just be competitive where you can be, cooperative where you have to be.

maxglute7• 11 months ago

The rebuttal to the classic Chinese collapse #s.

- 300% is one measure of PRC aggregate debt that PRC collapsers want to compare with US government debt, ~120%. US aggregate debt is like 700-800%.

- The cities are generally fine, the recent retarded 1/2 local gov "sinking" / revenue chart being passed around based on Shih/Elkobi study using none standard metrics. The chart itself collated by retard who doesn't know PRC cities receive lots of central gov funding (~60%), so structurally local gov can spend more % of local revenue paying off debt. Seems like they're 100% debt servicing when it's minority share. Or else you know... all the those cities would have collapsed from no service. Also PRC also does try to pay off debt when it's prudent i.e. the principle, instead of rolling YoY forever. Hence they still have much better borrowing rates. Yes LGFVs and some shadow debts get roll overs, but PRC also does structural deleveraging to actually pay off debt - why local gov debt repayment is high last few years.

TLDR, think of PRC as household with ~1/2 the total debt as US, meanwhile PRC tries pays off principle and interest. US just largely services interest, but reserve currency allows a lot of stupid spending until spending catches up. I Why debt is fucking crazy in the states, is a political concern, except at the same time politicians can play fuckarounditis like it doesn't matter. A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking bout real money. Maybe.

rado• 11 months ago

Been there a few times. I see the skepticism in the comments and would suggest to just visit and see for yourself. Of course it won’t be the full picture but just check it out. It’s perfectly safe, and now easier than ever.

scythe• 11 months ago

Transportation? California approved high-speed rail in 2008 to link LA and San Francisco for $33 billion. Costs ballooned; there’s still no service. The U.K. canceled HS2’s northern leg after years of overruns. Berlin’s new airport opened almost a decade late and billions over budget. Meanwhile, China built 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail that runs at 350 km/h.

I know this is a tangent but I really think it's completely asinine that we hold passenger rail and particularly high-speed rail to the same standards (environmental, eminent domain, etc) as other projects — public and private — in light of the fundamental differences:

- RoW for trains is highly constrained. Turns and hills are both very bad. A factory can be moved. A road can turn. A train is SOL.

- Passenger rail displaces transport modes that have far worse externalities for the environment, human safety and land use. Other infrastructure generally does not do this. There are a few exceptions like powerlines.

- Failing transport networks are a national embarrassment. If we have to do this — if we're committed to Cold War Two — then can't we at least win?

It's not just China that built more miles of passenger rail than the United States in the past two decades. It's also Mexico. Something is wrong.

Liftyee2• 11 months ago

I have a cognitive dissonance between valuing freedom and privacy and China's level of development (because of/in spite of limited freedom).

My hopes for China fall into 2 main camps: - Measured increases in personal freedom. Restricting information serves to slow the viral spread of minority/non-mainstream opinions (i.e. limiting the reach of a vocal minority), but keeping the population from being exposed to "bad" information is only beneficial as long as the government is "good".

- Acknowledge/continue working on current issues (demographic issues, housing market, domestic consumption). The worst that can happen to a country is that they trick themselves with their own lies (a common trope in many films featuring non-Western countries).

Interested in hearing thoughts/rebuttals/additions on this.

Disclaimer: I am ethnically Chinese but grew up outside the country.

threatofrain2• 11 months ago

I feel like democratic nations have a similar issue in that information players often have a big advantage and ordinary people have no chance in getting a correct story. Personally I feel overwhelmed with how much a person has to keep up with just to cast a few votes correctly every now and them.

At the very least, democracy is a comprehensive strategy and multiple policies must in place simultaneously to approach the leading cases of success that we see in current times, such as decades of great education.

tuatoru2• 11 months ago

Democracy isn't really about the people having a say. Especially not having to be correct. That's window dressing on the core advantage, which is regime change without bloodshed. Under other systems of government, prominent supporters of the old regime generally lost their lives or were exiled.

Regime change without bloodshed changes the incentives for rulers enough that it's worth them building anad preserving things rather than just extracting as much as possible for themselves and their families and supporters. There's the chance they can come back.

aurareturn19• 11 months ago

In San Francisco, renters always vote for more lottery-based low income housing which add cost and regulation to new buildings instead of decreasing regulation to build more. Even in a democracy, leaders have a way of convincing people to vote opposite of what they truly want.

jajuuka2• 11 months ago

I think a lot of that dissonance comes from the adversarial framing that is always pushed about China. That it's China vs the US or China vs the west. Americans especially have grown up with the idea that communist china is terrible and capitalist America is good for many decades. The reality demands a far more nuanced view of government and economy. As well as facing hard truths about values like freedom. Not to mention reckoning with the western individualist mindset.

If anything this should open our eyes that there are more paths in front of us to take than a simple dichotomy.

Liftyee2• 11 months ago

Agree that reality is always more nuanced than the simple views pushed by news and the (mainstream) internet.

Unfortunately oversimplified, pre-digested informational slop is easy to convey and satisfying to ingest. Nuanced viewpoints take flak from both sides of people who have absorbed the former kind of information.

It is definitely interesting (annoying?) how it is often taken as a given that China is an enemy of the US rather than a competitor in the global scene with values both in common and in disagreement. Perhaps there is some colonial/empire-building projection going on, or the US wants to keep being the only country to meddle in other countries' politics.

aurareturn19• 11 months ago

  Disclaimer: I am ethnically Chinese but grew up outside the country.

Let me ask you an interesting question. What do you consider as freedom? The ability to own a gun or the ability to walk outside without ever having the chance of randomly shot dead?

Because most Chinese people believe the latter is freedom while most Americans believe the former is freedom. Since most people on HN are Americans, freedom is defined as the former here.

Sammi5• 11 months ago

European here: There are sooooo many other freedoms you aren't considering at all. Typical American exceptionalism. "American values are the only values". I am saying so with a gentle snobbish roll of the eyes.

Agraillo2• 11 months ago

Let's start with the Freedom House index [1]

    Finland 100/100
    .....
    United States 84/100
    .....
    China 9/100
    ......
    Turkmenistan 1/100

Before claiming a hidden agenda or conflicts of interest of those behind the organization, first evaluate their methodology [2]. You may even agree with the methodology but argue that the actual numbers were calculated incorrectly

the ability to walk outside without ever having the chance of randomly shot dead

This is a good measure of risk perception, and you can even use it as one of the freedom scores. The problem is that it is hard to measure. For example, consider if this measure is based on a poll: if an act of terrorism occurs just before the poll is taken, the score will definitely drop. However, in countries where such news is heavily suppressed (e.g., the former USSR), the scores may appear perfect.

[1] https://freedomhouse.org/country/scores

[2] https://freedomhouse.org/reports/freedom-world/freedom-world...

psychoslave2• 11 months ago

We have freedom and safety when we are able to carry a gun and make a walk as we please whenever we want with very low risk for our life, and we can also chose not to hold a gun and not to make a walk at moment defined by other without any change in threat for our life.

rchaud• 11 months ago

A solar panel bench with wireless charging in a random small town in Yunnan anyone?

Did anyone else see the picture and immediately think that this design wouldn't be possible in the west because it didn't have any anti-homeless barriers on it?

tiahura• 11 months ago

The counter-culture movement had tremendous success in eliminating the basic forces regulating antisocial behavior.

imp0cat• 11 months ago

The author of this article seem to be fixated on China too much.

These benches are quite common in southern Europe (Croatia). https://total-croatia-news.com/news/made-in-croatia/more-cro...

kelseyfrog• 11 months ago

If China is more successful then we're rubes.

Every time an article like this hits, the Western brain spasms.

But…but they don’t innovate, they just copy!

But…but ghost cities, Evergrande, debt spiral. Any day now it all collapses!

But…but how do they even freedom?

We can't believe China is eating the world because it would mean Western Civilization is contingent - that everything leading up to this point wasn't an inevitability. That we actually had a choice and got tricked into strip malls, failed governance, and life long debt. That wealth inequality wasn't actually our destiny and the people who got rich off what we built didn't actually deserve it.

So we have to believe that people may ride those trains and pay with those QR codes, but deep down, their souls are yearning for suburban strip malls, CNN panel discussions, and 30-year mortgages.

China has to be perpetually both failing and knocking at our doorstep because the idea that then we’re left with the intolerable truth: they actually built things that work, and we chose not to.

password543214• 11 months ago

Prediction: China is going to get the same treatment as Japan currently is in the future for tourism. It is going through its stages of racism in the West that Japan went through (along with many other countries) where ordinary people still think it is just a smog filled industrial dump but in the future it will probably start getting a further influx of Western tourists like Japan did. Japan wasn't even on many people's radar until social media because the West likes to pretend East Asia doesn't exist unless it serves their narrative.

chrisco25517• 11 months ago

Japan wasn't even on many people's radar until social media because the West likes to pretend the East Asia doesn't exist unless it serves their narrative.

You're joking right? Like Japan has been a central part of American culture since at least the 80s. I grew up on Nintendo, Mario is more famous than Mickey Mouse at this point. Everyone had Sony Walkmans long before social media came out. Toyota and Honda won the passenger car market many decades ago. There's always in my lifetime been a huge constituency of Japan fans in the U.S., praising everything from anime to sushi to video games to Tokyo markets.

Japan is getting a huge influx of tourism from the west right now because their economy has been on a 3 decade slog after rapid growth from the 50s through the 90s. Their population is in decline and their currency has gotten very weak. Thus, it's cheaper for westerners to visit than it has been in the past.

password543214• 11 months ago

Just look at tourism numbers. In the space of decade the numbers over doubled for the US alone within the 2010s. What's more plausible, the Yen or social media advertisement? You are also talking about Nintendo/Pop-culture I am talking about tourism for the masses.

Respecting people and their culture versus enjoying instant ramen are not the same thing.

usernamed72• 11 months ago

This is... not going to happen. China and Japan are very different countries. Comparing them is nothing short of a false equivalence.

ordinary people still think it is just a smog filled industrial dump

China regularly has the most polluted air quality in the world, and the water is undrinkable due to heavy metals and chemicals. Both are observable and well documented. Not to mention the crumbling infrastructure, the flooding, the extremely low trust society...

Japan and China could not be any more different.

password543214• 11 months ago

Thank you for proving my point on the current mainstream western narrative.

chrisco25517• 11 months ago

This essay is far too swooning to take seriously.

Mobile payments vs credit card payments aren't a revolution. America has Google and Apple Pay but most Americans still swipe. It's just not that different and it's easier to compartmentalize your spending that way.

The idea of an "everything app" like WeChat actually turns me completely off. I don't want everything in one app. I want compartmentalization. I value it, in fact.

The West spent 150 years building coal plants, then natural gas, then slowly adding renewables. China went from burning coal directly to becoming the world's solar panel factory. They make 80% of all solar panels globally.

China is also, incidentally the coal king of the world, and has rapidly expanded coal production over the last few decades. Their coal consumption has tripled since 2000. For all the breathless commentary on solar the author spares no ink on China's appetite for coal.

The reason people still claim China is a developing country is so that they get a pass on arbitrary restrictions imposed on "developed" Western nations who like to pay lip service to climate change concerns and don't mind the gradual decline that comes along with this antigrowth mindset. Meanwhile the world has outsourced production to China, where coal makes up a majority of the electricity generated. Your country is getting leapfrogged by a competitor who doesn't play by your rules, but at least you can virtue signal to your elite friends while it happens.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China

While California can't build anything these days, I would not hold their dysfunction to the rest of the Union. Florida built high speed rail between West Palm Beach and Orlando in just 4 years, and the route extends to Miami. Tesla built Giga Texas, the second largest building in the world by volume, in 14 months. American tech is also in the lead in self driving navigation.

China skipped the strip mall phase entirely. They went straight from street markets to super-apps that livestream shopping, where one influencer can sell $15 million worth of lipstick in five minutes

China was never going to have strip malls. Strip malls are a feature of suburban life. China does not have the same geography nor the same decentralized population distribution as the U.S. has.

As for livestream shopping, spare me. Americans don't shop via livestream because we're not entertained by the idea of being pitched crap we don't need. It's not novel to us either, we had the QVC network going back to the 80s. When I buy something, I search, click add to cart, and then checkout.

We’re going to solve climate change with a lot of Chinese technology—or we’re not going to solve it at all.

If you buy the idea that we're going to solve for climate change with Chinese tech while China continues to pollute more than ever, I don't know what to tell you.

China's "tech" in this case isn't their tech. Japan has produced more of the IP surrounding solar panels than anyone else, followed by the U.S.

triceratops5• 11 months ago

For all the breathless commentary on solar the author spares no ink on China's appetite for coal.

They have a lot of coal so they burn coal. The US has a lot of natural gas so it burns natural gas (and bafflingly, continues to insist on burning coal, even when it's uneconomical). So they're about even.

There is one difference. 80% of new electricity generation in China in the past 3 or 4 years has come from solar or other renewable sources. So while they may burn coal now, they won't always burn coal. America has sadly chosen a different path.

chrisco25517• 11 months ago

The U.S. has tons of both coal and Natural Gas but it shifted its energy production to Natural Gas in part due to carbon emissions. Coal was cheaper than natural gas, but fracking made natural gas cheaper. Either way, natural gas burns 50-60% cleaner than coal.

China still onboarded more than 173GW of coal in the last 5 years. That is 60% additional electricity from coal than Japan spends in a whole year. That is 3x what Germany spends in a year.

They continue to pollute more than ever.

dcre2• 11 months ago

I need to find the quote, but historian and political commentary Adam Tooze suggested a few months ago that China's global economic and political dominance in this century could be so total that future historians will come to think of the entire modern history of Europe and the US as a mere setup for China becoming what it is. I find myself thinking about this almost every day.

chrisco25517• 11 months ago

Anyone who makes such breathless predictions about the future is automatically worth dismissing. At no point in history did any such opinions ever play out to be true.

dcre2• 11 months ago

You're saying nothing dramatic or surprising has ever happened in history, or at best that when it did, no one saw it coming. Both are obviously wrong.

In any case, Tooze is a serious thinker who has written various things besides this line I paraphrased from a podcast. I recommend checking out his work.

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-401-the-dollar-sy...

readthenotes1• 11 months ago

Given their population implosion, I find China 2099 hard to grasp...

wing-_-nuts7• 11 months ago

China's global economic and political dominance in this century could be so total that future historians will come to think of the entire modern history of Europe and the US as a mere setup for China becoming what it is

That's surely an interesting take when their demographics are absolutely imploding, and their economy is rife with state sponsored excess funded by debt.

Say what you will about capital markets, but they do tend to deliver things that are actually desired and economically valuable given the right pricing incentives.

I've long argued that we should replace our income tax with a progressive but heavy carbon tax. This would be far more effective than federal greenhouse gas regs and incentive programs. Unfortunately they're politically dead on arrival because they would tax the rich, powerful and politically connected far more than your average joe.

kamikazeturtles2• 11 months ago

That's surely an interesting take when their demographics are absolutely imploding, and their economy is rife with state sponsored excess funded by debt.

“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” - Sun Tzu, The Art of War

I don't believe any of the stats coming out of China. I think it is best to approach data coming out of adversarial countries with lots of paranoia.

kiba2• 11 months ago

That's surely an interesting take when their demographics are absolutely imploding, and their economy is rife with state sponsored excess funded by debt.

If anti-aging tech arrives in the next two decades, demographic will stop imploding, their and everyone else. It becomes a matter of execution.

I've long argued that we should replace our income tax with a progressive but heavy carbon tax. This would be far more effective than federal greenhouse gas regs and incentive programs. Unfortunately they're politically dead on arrival because they would tax the rich, powerful and politically connected far more than your average joe.

Piguovian taxes and LVT are good ideas if politically difficult to implement, yet I am cautiously optimistic. There had been news about accurate appraisal of land in Baltimore that made local media coverage.

cpursley2• 11 months ago

Even with an imploding population, they still will be graduating more scientists and engineers than the entire combined west. Furthermore, AI and automation is going to mitigate and offset this in the developed world.

tokioyoyo9• 11 months ago

China still has 1/3 of the population living in rural areas. They can support their infrastructure and growth for the time being until they find a way out of the population problems. By the time it becomes a real problem for them, it could be worse everywhere else in the world due to insane amount of investments in automation.

ohdeargodno2• 11 months ago

and their economy is rife with state sponsored excess funded by debt.

Whereas the US is better with state sponsored VC funded debt ?

but they do tend to deliver things that are actually desired and economically valuable given the right pricing incentives.

No, they don't. Any look at the market in the past 15 years will tell you that they don't, and that nothing major or of value has been produced by "the market". It's all propped on debt and infinite money printing.

hash872• 11 months ago

Adam Tooze's grandfather was one of the most notorious Soviet moles/traitors in British history, so I guess I don't find it surprising that he's found a new Communist regime to hang his hat on. (For anyone saying 'he can't choose his family'- Tooze famously dedicated his first book in effusive praise for his grandfather)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Wynn

paradox4602• 11 months ago

Wumaos gonna wumaos. Only the names change

thefourthchime2• 11 months ago

The thing I keep coming back to with China is that it's (mostly) mono-ethnic and that ethnicity is rapidly aging, such as South Korea and Japan. The birth rate is tragic, and soon they're going to have a lot of infrastructure and old people and no one around to support it.

The other shoe that is waiting to drop is the amount of spending and shadowy debts that to prop up the real estate industry. The vast majority of Chinese have invested their life savings into what looks like a mirage.

Thirdly, they've become the world's factory. But now now they've priced themselves out and it's moving to places like Vietnam and India. So now what's left? Consumer spending? High tech? It looks like they need to reinvent themselves again.

aurareturn19• 11 months ago

To be honest, you can write similar gloomy vibes for any country. Every country has its own set of problems. No?

HSO• 11 months ago

Yea, Tooze is one of the very few westerners who gets it

https://overcast.fm/+AAN68WmR_iU/45:36

He also wrote a reasonable piece on the western mischaracterization and rewriting history of china‘s pandemic response

canucker2016• 11 months ago

the USA was worried that Japan would take over/buy up the USA in the late 80s, esp. after Sony bought Columbia Pictures and Mitsubishi bought Rockefeller Center in NYC.

see https://www.businessinsider.com/japans-eighties-america-buyi...

and movies like Gung Ho, and Rising Sun, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_(film) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_(1993_film)

terminalshort• 11 months ago

The dominance of the West came from the industrial revolution. The countries that industrialized first could generate such a massively higher economic output per capita that they could easily dominate all pre-industrial nations. This level of advantage hadn't been seen since the last fundamental change in human society from hunter-gatherer to agrarian. China may well be the dominant state of the 21st century, but their advantage will be incremental unless there is some similar breakthrough waiting to happen that will occur in China first.

jpgvm• 11 months ago

Their edge will be population size. For China to remain less economically powerful than the US their standard of living must remain massively below that of the US.

That is just unrealistic on a longer timescale.

uncircle2• 11 months ago

Do you really think the Western, especially the US hegemony would go down without a bang?

Sure, China might rule over the ashes, but I wouldn't make large bets over what the world would look like when the tensions that have accumulated over the past 30 years explode catastrophically.

alessandru2• 11 months ago

drivel.

yunnan is rural historic farm area, next to tibet, it's not supposed to have mcdo. did author cry he couldn't get shake shack in tibet?

Are they leading in solar panels? wow ... almost like cheap labor and non-existent pollution control makes manufacturing real cheap. Did you hear they're also mining and burning more coal than ever, despite the west's alleged 150 year advantage. But let's forget that. we can totally trust china to remove coal by 2030 like promised.

we call china "emerging" because most (numbers, not the average) of its people make less than 10k per year. most of its rich people aren't investing in stocks or bonds. the government still needs to direct investment in large swaths of society, that is why china earns its "developing" label.

do you think china's courts are developed? we call them emerging or developing, because they haven't shown to be independent yet and they issue political rulings like in some ... developing ... banana republic. that's why it's called developing. their institutions aren't particularly ... instituted.

misleading calling china leader in heat pumps ... yes cheap heat pumps. good for them. but volume doesn't mean good, everyone likes cheap stuff.

china makes 5 year government plans public, what is this 20 year plan he talks about? what is the success rate of these public plans? remember, they promised to control coal and reduce usage by 2030.

small countries like singapore becoming more authoritarian by copying chinese politics isn't the bragging win you think it is.

stickfigure3• 11 months ago

I think the wrong lesson is being taken here. China, like Russia, started from an incredibly low baseline - largely caused by authoritarian power. A new authoritarian power revitalized the economy and genuinely improved people's lives. People are generally grateful, and they have reason to be.

The fast pace of economic growth didn't necessarily come from authoritarianism (though I'll accept it helped in some ways) but from the fast catch-up. That isn't going to last forever. Growth will slow - it's slowing already. And when it does, a generation of people (who grew up wealthy) will start to think about corruption, human rights, and having a say in what goes on.

My thesis is something like "any authoritarian can sail a ship in calm seas". The government of China's hard times are ahead of it. It's too early to write an epitaph for democracy.

yubblegum• 11 months ago

A new authoritarian power revitalized the economy

Fantasy history there. No, the actual timeline: USA determined that USSR-CPC split and animosity were real and should be exploited. China, a social and economic basketcase, also saw the benefit of pivoting to the West.

Then (fortuitously for the Chinese ..) Mao died and Deng Xiaping came to power and then to the US and wore a cowboy hat! Western Capitalists* , whether due to their cupidity (or stupidity), convinced themselves that massive investment, funds, and technology transfer to Communist China would somehow engender a "liberal China" in a generation.

Even after CPC crushed the "liberal" front in its cadre in 1989, which should have been a wakeup call to the idiot class that rules the West, we had 8 years of Slick Willy letting China get their hands on all sorts of tech and secret in US and the West.

And now, the Orange Clown is finishing "the job" by laying waste to US aliances and institutions, making sure 21st is irrevocably the Chinese Century.

So that, hn, is how China actually got to "eat the world".

https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/1kp4mxw/deng_x...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...

*: No that ain't you and that certainty ain't me and it's not even the fabled "10%". Try the 0.1%.

kiba2• 11 months ago

I do not think the 21st century is necessarily already determined. China had suffered so much in the 20th century, including famine and revolution and yet they still rose.

What Trump did so far is a farce but it's recoverable.

History is too unpredictable to determine which nation is the winner of the 21st century. Anybody who claims to know the future have too much certainty about the course of history.

ffsm8• 11 months ago

A gigantic part of China's Rise is actually down to Apple.

Channel 4 news made an interview with a financial times journalist if you wanna hear a neat summary https://youtu.be/43PtL0XQeA8?si=bovF8wXeK9Ege4Mz

But it's not exclusive to this video, lots of coverage around, from way bigger channels too.

e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAj9zB4vaZc

qzw2• 11 months ago

Western Capitalists didn’t and don’t give two shits about a liberal China. The investments were made and technologies transferred because the Chinese government required them in order for Western companies to access China’s enormous pool of stable and cheap labor. As for this being the Chinese century, I think it’s not an inevitability. Japan at one point also looked like it had a shot of becoming a dominant economic superpower.

vineyardmike• 11 months ago

And now, the Orange Clown is finishing "the job" by laying waste to US aliances and institutions, making sure 21st is irrevocably the Chinese Century.

I’m going to concur with others here. It’s not irrecoverable. And the future isn’t yet written.

China has had the fortune (even eclipsing the US) of being a giant market of burgeoning consumers and massive amount of labor. The US first won this economic opportunity partially through immigration and a well-timed WW2 victory. Now its chinas turn to wield consumerism.

That said, China also has the misfortune of a serious risk for population collapse due, in part, to the prior 1 child policy. They’re aging faster than the US and others nations, and that will dramatically shift their economic output, consumption, and of course strain government resources. They also don’t have a culture of immigration like the US to slow the change. It would take a major global shift to see large immigration into China. There are other major economic risks they face, like their real estate debt, but the population collapse does pose a significant threat to stunt or reverse their ascendance.

TLDR: China could be the next Japan, not the next US.

mvieira38• 11 months ago

You forget some characteristics of China's political economy that make their quality of life improvements way bigger and are not accounted for in this story. For example, the unprecedented investment in clean energy is seamlessly (compared to the west at least) followed by improvements to the grid. The central planner knows the plan, so he can account for the infrastructure necessary, which is not true for capitalist countries. The USA is laughably behind other powers in terms of basics like mass transportation and energy partly because of this coordination issue. No need to get started with how ahead China is with internet infrastructure, too, right?

kaiwenwang• 11 months ago

You know, the whole git 'master' branch stuff has many in the USA exhausted about arguing over words and their meaning.

A good shortcut is to just invent and use new words. USSR-PRC is probably better than arguing over CPC or CCP, which itself probably comes from the Russian CCCP as the Alaska Trump-Putin meeting made me notice.

As per Google: CCCP is the Cyrillic form of the Russian acronym СССР, which stands for Союз Советских Социалистических Республик (Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik).

Other things that may be beneficial to do: not anthropomorphizing countries and using the neuter "it", saying "X government" like USG instead of "Washington DC." Using stand-ins like Washington DC for US Government another word is called metonymy.

manfromchina1• 11 months ago

In this kind of analysis it is always something that is done to or for China. The latter never has any kind of agency. Neither the will nor mind of its own. If that were true China would have stayed a complete and utter shithole no matter the investment whether political, intellectual, financial or scientific.

scrubs2• 11 months ago

@yubblegum nails it - well written. I might add a couple of things:

- China had a free look at what Japan did so well 70s-90s

- China had a free look at Russia and most definitely did not repeat their mistakes economically. Russia ought to be the most embarrassed of all how well done China has done.

- the above two points are compliments to china: they take statecraft far smarter abd seriously for them. Similarly, China isn't stupid enough to start a war (Ukraine) they couldn't mop up with a low level adversary. But Russia is because they're fragile that way.

- China under Nixon sided with the US and the west, who had solid currency to pay for goods. That helped a lot.

- we Americans made the same mistake germany did with Russian energy: economic ties are not a by way to western liberlization. You can't buy off Russia from invading.

- and as for us Americans: we didn't protect ourselves in job losses through nafta, or China. It wasn't woke liberal politicians who sent jobs overseas or to canada/Mexico or china. It was private corporate owners/boards. And yes, they are a special kind of stupid if they couldn't see the long game china played. China had a long game; US only saw $ signs. Good lord! China was never going to allow dominance in manufacturing or access to Chinese markets by outsiders. The British made sure of that. Period.

- the US is now at a point where job security is more important than cheap crap at 5 and below, while china has moved onto high end. The days of trading lower consumer prices for job losses is waning.

tim333• 11 months ago

My take is if you look at Chinese people anywhere outside China, say in the US, Singapore or wherever they are hard working, educated and prosperous, it's a cultural thing to a large extent. In China they were reduced to poverty by communism and are now catching up with their brethren elsewhere and still a fair way behind the US, Singa etc on a per capita basis.

xphilter• 11 months ago

Cultural thing or…selection bias. The people who left were the ones with the personality and work ethic that leads to being successful.

fakedang4• 11 months ago

Precisely. And you'll see parallels across other similar communities - Gujaratis, Persians, Keralites, Armenians, Jews, Punjabi Sikhs, Lebanese Maronites, Ahmadiyyas, Sindhis, Parsees and Dawoodi Bohras, etc. All communities which faced/face historical or modern-day persecution, or rampant corruption and cronyism in their original regions, but tend to do miraculously well once they leave them behind.

Either these people will migrate abroad and improve their host countries, or their home countries will grow a brain and beg them to stay behind with carrots. Lots of carrots. Like China.

anigbrowl2• 11 months ago

reduced to poverty by communism

Communism does not take off in stable prosperous societies because there isn't a market for it. It quite literally requires an underclass of people unhappy enough to stake their lives on establishing a different social order.

Leary2• 11 months ago

Amazing analysis, except for the fact China was dirt poor before communism.

eatsyourtacos3• 11 months ago

China works as a society to truly try to help their people. They invest in their country and people. That is why they are prospering. It's not just "catching up".

The US for example doesn't take care of it's people. They do the absolute bare minimum in the name of illusionary "freedom". The only people who are free are the rich.

Call it whatever you want.. but there is great benefit in having a government who recognizes that society comes first- not the individual.

georgeburdell• 11 months ago

You’re going back and forth between two concepts: society and its people. Look at the Covid lockdowns for evidence of how much China (or other Chinese for that matter) care about individuals.

axus• 11 months ago

Compare the social programs of China to the social programs of the US. USA has Supplemental Security Income, Medicare, Social Security, emergency rooms cannot turn away patients. There's friction, but the US definitely does take care of its _old_ people. What's the equivalent in China? I'm not saying they don't, but I'd like to know.

qzw2• 11 months ago

This is a very naive view of what goes on in China. Not saying China doesn’t do anything right, but it’s far from the utopia you seem to think it is. There’s pretty rampant corruption at all levels of government and business, even to the point the central government acknowledges that repeated reforms are necessary. There are also plenty of billionaires in China who, along with the rich and well connected (often one and the same), enjoy a level of privilege and freedom unimaginable to the ordinary people. China’s social safety net has also been eroding to the point that if someone really has to depend on the state to take care of them, they’d be living a very meager life indeed.

incr_me3• 11 months ago

China, like Russia, started from an incredibly low baseline - largely caused by authoritarian power. A new authoritarian power revitalized the economy and genuinely improved people's lives. People are generally grateful, and they have reason to be.

Besides the ideological component here being embarrassingly incoherent (the bad was caused by "authoritarian power" in general; the good was caused by "a new authoritarian power" in particular) your facts are plain wrong. The low baseline was pre-Mao (and pre-Lenin) when famine, illiteracy, technological impoverishment, and labor immobility was the rule. Deng's opening up certainly was something, but it undoubtedly stood upon the shoulders of the Mao era. Even the WEF agrees: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/06/how-china-got-rich-4...

But the “conventional wisdom” ignores the fact that — even inclusive of the serious mistakes, lost lives and lost years that some insist define the early decades after 1949 — the foundations laid during Mao’s rule, including land reform and redistribution, substantial investments in heavy industry, public health, literacy, electrification, and transportation gave China a substantial leg up. These developments positioned China for takeoff well ahead of the official inauguration of Reform and Opening in 1978. While Deng’s reforms catalyzed China’s economic takeoff, they built upon critical foundations established during Mao’s era, which are often overlooked.

Even the WEF is wrong, of course, because they do the usual thing of inflating the importance of GDP; GDP has virtually no applicability to a socialist economy and the "revitalization" you speak of was, as far as its quantitative measure, a magic trick. A literal capitalization upon decades of labor mobilization.

hkpack3• 11 months ago

The low baseline was pre-Mao (and pre-Lenin) when famine

Wow, so we are on rewriting history now?

“Lenin” and his cronies caused a massive famines with their own hands.

Substantial percentage of population died of hunger on a very fertile soil without any natural disaster [0].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%93...

ACCount37• 11 months ago

Yes, it's quite easy to keep people content with an invasive autocracy and human right violations when you have staggering economic growth and a sharp rise in quality of life to show for it.

It's not just China. A big part of why Putin in Russia has managed to hold onto power for so long was that Russia's recovery from the collapse of USSR was happening during his first two presidential terms. Even though very little of that recovery could be attributed to Putin's policies.

The same holds for democracy too. Good economy makes for content population. But if your country's economy is going to shit, that doesn't bode well for whatever party that happens to be in charge - and might even open the doors for an authoritarian takeover.

tokioyoyo9• 11 months ago

The sea was not calm in 2010s, and certainly not in 2020s. Predictions to China’s collapse has been circulating for the past 15 years, and it just never panned out.

Unsurprisingly, when you have authoritarianism that’s at least mildly supported by the citizens, you can do wonders with 1.4B people. At some point, we have to give them credit where it’s due.

ViewTrick1002• 11 months ago

From your perspective or the perspective of the Chinese people feeling their increased well being by the year?

No matter how rocky the world is the seas are calm when everyone has in close memory how it used to be.

Sammi5• 11 months ago

The sea was not calm in 2010s, and certainly not in 2020s.

China had double digit gdp growth in 2000s, high single digit in 2010s, and still decent single digit in 2020s - that is until a year or so ago. These are the calm seas that used to be but are no longer.

Geo politically China has and will always be squeezed, just by their geographic location. But economically they were flying ahead in the last few decades, and everything is so much easier while you have strong economic growth. Growth that they are struggling to realize suddenly... this will be a huge change and challenge for internal politics in China going forward.

Because when people are getting wealthier each year then they are happy. But as soon as that stops, then it's like when the music stops and people have to find the first available chair to sit on. Those that don't find one will be unhappy.

bgnn4• 11 months ago

Apart from nothing lasts forever.. This is a speculative take too, as the OP. We don't know what will happen in China in the future. One thing is true: at the moment their change is towards more democracy and personal rights, and it's the exact opposite in the West. My theorty, a counter-theory to yours if you will, is that the wealth growth for the lower and middle classes declined or reversed in the West (US, Europe, Canada etc) since 70s, which coincides with the West divesting from industrial production and embracing the financialization of the economy. Today EU is officially applying censorship on media and trying hard on controlling the personal communications of persons, similar trends in US. We think we are better than China, but from the non-Western countries the difference isn't that big anymore.

PikachuEXE2• 11 months ago

I agree with your opinion on US/EU etc. as they have more leftism/collectivism/socialism growing. But I don't understand "One thing is true: at the moment their change is towards more democracy and personal rights" part and maybe you can provide more explanations/examples/sources/whatever?

int_19h2• 11 months ago

One thing is true: at the moment their change is towards more democracy and personal rights

That does not seem to be the case anymore under Xi.

TiredOfLife• 11 months ago

One thing is true: at the moment their change is towards more democracy and personal rights

And the large fleet of troop transport ships china is actively building is to spread that democracy to neighoring countries

Same with supporting russian invasian in Ukraine

sho_hn• 11 months ago

Calling the history of the CCP a "ship on calm seas" really sounds like you need to pick up a book on Chinese history.

stickfigure3• 11 months ago

I'm calling the modern history of the CCP "a ship on calm seas". It's easy to be popular when everyone is going from poor to rich. That will not continue forever.

Sammi5• 11 months ago

The last decades have seen dependable gdp growth in China. These are the calm seas that matter in this context.

This growth has stopped recently...

arp2425• 11 months ago

My thesis is something like "any authoritarian can sail a ship in calm seas". The government of China's hard times are ahead of it. It's too early to write an epitaph for democracy.

This applies to neither Russia nor China. Especially not China – authoritarian China if the 50s-70s was a complete clusterfuck every which way, in no small part due to Mao's staggering incompetence. A key part of Xiaoping's reforms of the 80s – which lifted hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty – was renouncing some of Mao's more mad notions.

There are plenty of other examples where authoritarians screwed over their countries quite badly, from Mugabe to Suharto to Maduro. To say nothing of people like Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, and similar jolly fellows who outright murdered their own people by the millions.

In authoritarian regimes you have no meaningful pushback. When Putin says "we're going to invade Ukraine real quick, stoke me a kipper, back before supper" then no one is going to say "you idiot, that's fucking mental" because you risk brutally accidentally falling out of the window while taking a shower. And now Russia is "stuck" in this pointless war because Putin has painted himself in a corner, and there is not going to be a peaceful change of governance in Russia, after which a new administration can change course.

In addition authoritarians are free to be as corrupt as they like of course. Who is going to hold them to account?

In the short term an authoritarian can do the right thing (Xiaoping is an example), but in the long term it never works out because sooner or later an idiot and/or asshole will plant their arsecheeks on the throne, after which you're fucked.

saulpw• 11 months ago

in the long term it never works out because sooner or later an idiot and/or asshole will plant their arsecheeks on the throne, after which you're fucked.

Seems like this can happen in a democracy just the same.

letn1• 11 months ago

Great when you have a democratic world that provides you with the technologies. Not that great when you dont have democratic world that provides you with the technologies.

gp904• 11 months ago

The fast pace of economic growth didn't necessarily come from authoritarianism

You're right. The fast pace of growth came from the policies that encourage ruthless capitalism. You can see that Chinese government controls business like oil and tobacco, but it gives tons of freedom for business owners to run wild.

nirv2• 11 months ago

Chinese government [...] gives tons of freedom for business owners to run wild

This claim is provably incorrect.

Analysis of all 37.5 million registered firms in China reveals that 65% of the largest 1,000 private owners have direct equity ties with state owners […] The number of private owners with direct equity ties with the state almost tripled between 2000 and 2019, and those with indirect equity ties rose 50-fold.
Provincial and local government officials in China enforce laws and control resources, such as land and loans, but these officials change positions every few years. […] Publicly listed firms increase perk spending (travel, dining, and entertainment) by an average of 3.6 million yuan (20%) when new local officials take charge. […] The results are consistent with the view that local officials are important gatekeepers and firms seek to influence them with perks and positions of power within SOEs.[1][2]
China’s domestic politics have changed significantly over the past decade, with the top leadership enacting much more muscular policies to limit the power of large corporations while also deploying extensive measures to support firms, especially in key industries. According to Hsieh, this trend means that companies need to navigate the state’s “two strong hands,” one supportive and the other restrictive which aim to increase the party’s control over the economy even as the private sector continues, in one form or another, to grow. Moreover, political control is likely proving oppressive for companies as the party-state increasingly weights national security over economic growth. […] These findings […] suggest that not all government intervention in the economy is welcome by Chinese companies, especially if it comes with national security strings attached. The findings from the experiment suggest that state and party influence on private firms may have evolved to prioritize politics above economic growth, creating new challenges for companies that would naturally seek to maximize political support alongside autonomy.[3]

[1] https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/rise-state-conne...

[2] https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/how-do-chinas-fi...

[3] https://bigdatachina.csis.org/unpacking-linkages-between-the...

SilverElfin3• 11 months ago

And when it does, a generation of people (who grew up wealthy) will start to think about corruption, human rights, and having a say in what goes on.

Maybe. But what happens when that group of people are suppressed and it takes a lot longer for them to become brave and speak up? Meanwhile, the government of China will become more powerful and be more of a hegemonic power than America ever was. That may extend their ability to govern and remain authoritarian. Not just for their citizens, but against other regions they unfortunately control like Hong Kong or Taiwan or Tibet or Xinjiang.

aurareturn19• 11 months ago

Why do you say it’s unfortunate that China controls those places?

ZeroGravitas2• 11 months ago

Luckily the democratic west has been setting a really good example so there's no way a hegemonic China can get away with genocide, chopping up journalists, poisoning the air, causing famines, ignoring international bodies, committing war crimes, torturing people, toppling other country's governments, invading nations on flimsy pretexts...

And all that's before counting whatever Trump manages to ruin before his time is up.

refurb8• 11 months ago

The blog post reads like propaganda - hitting on the same old metrics like GDP by PPP (ignoring all the other metrics that are getting worse).

Who cares if it's the largest economy? What matters is productivity per person, which is around what Thailand produces - $13,000 USD per capita.

One question I love asking is the pro-China faction is - assuming China grows at 5% per year (it's no longer growing at 7-8%), how long would it take to catch up to the US on a GDP per capita basis with the US growing an anemic 2%?

What people forget is the US growing at 2% is equivalent to to China growing at 12% (since per capita GDP is 6x).

China needs to stop their slowing economy all in an environment of reduced global trade and a terrible demographic shift.

aurareturn19• 11 months ago

Retirement age in China has been around 55. If you go to China, you’ll see a ton of older retired people traveling around the country on high speed trains. You won’t find that many young people during day time. So that factor into GDP per capita.

But besides GDP per capita, I think your criticism of GDP PPP per capita is wrong. You can live a very decent life in China. In some ways, it’s superior to Americans for many Chinese people. You just have to go to China to see it for yourself.

idiomat9000• 11 months ago

The problem is more acute and current . China has not enough white collar work. It has no pension system , usually the 4 grandparents move in with their kids. Who must provide income for 6+ person households. Which only whit collar work can do. Or investments,like flats etc.

China is spiralling right now, not tomorrow , today.

thombee6• 11 months ago

China does have a pension system, not sure where you got your information from. Are you instead arguing that their pension system is not adequate?

lossolo• 11 months ago

China was the world’s largest economy for 18 of the past 20 centuries (with exceptions being parts of the 19th and 20th centuries, when Western Europe and then the U.S. surged ahead after the industrial revolution).

And China is no longer just catching up in many industries, it is leading innovation[1]. Many in China believe they are simply returning to their natural state being the world’s number one economy.

Your analysis is through the lens of Western culture. The definition and understanding of freedom and harmony are entirely different in China. I was in China and experienced this myself, so this is firsthand experience, not something I picked up from blogs or news. And China is not like Russia at all, Russia fills its government with oligarchs, while China fills it with science and technology experts[2]

And when it does, a generation of people (who grew up wealthy) will start to think about corruption, human rights, and having a say in what goes on.

In the Chinese context, freedom is defined collectively (freedom from chaos, poverty, or foreign domination etc), whereas here in the West it's individual liberty. Harmony and social stability are seen as more valuable than political pluralism, so authoritarian governance is culturally framed as legitimate. Chinese leaders and citizens remember periods of fragmentation and civil war (warlord era, Japanese invasion, cultural revolution). There is a widespread belief that adopting a Western adversarial political model could reintroduce instability and weaken national unity so something China cannot risk given its size and diversity.

That is the main reason this will not happen, you will not see a liberal style democracy in China. This claim is repeated all the time, but it is a total misunderstanding of their culture, ethnicity, and history. China has a long history of centralized, bureaucratic governance (over 2k years since the Qin Dynasty), where stability and order are prioritized.

1. https://itif.org/publications/2024/09/16/china-is-rapidly-be...

2. https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/chinas-xi-stacks-government...

tkel3• 11 months ago

Well said. The western definition of freedom as only individual freedom is not a good one. It is the same definition that allowed people to argue for keeping slaves, keeping other humans as their property, because "I have the freedom to do what I want with my property". And during the civil rights era, the same was true with "You can't tell me not to discriminate, I have the freedom to do what I want with my property, and my business is my property".

jimmydoe• 11 months ago

I am not particularly worried about authoritarian in China in long term.

Western especially the US has long been the release valve for CCP to manage dissidents and alike, and it’s been quite effective, countless young souls looking for freedom was assimilated and became faceless in the capitalism machinery abroad, instead of fighting for their future in China.

The self enshitification of USA will slowly but surely close that loophole CCP has been enjoying, and force more young Chinese to make China a better place for themselves as they will have no other choices.

anonzzzies5• 11 months ago

any authoritarian can sail a ship in calm sea

"any democratic gov can sail a ship in calm sea"

As we see in europe and the usa, when democracy lasts too long, people get too relaxed and free and turn unhappy with random things that annoy them. They used to be at work too much to worry about them, but now they can stare at their neighbour and wonder why this 'migrant' has more than them etc. Or whatever happens to annoy them. And consequently start voting for ultimately authoritarian 'leaders', which will make everything worse for them and most others.

omnimus5• 11 months ago

In europe it is exactly because people are less relaxed that they start to looking for someone to blame. Not the other way around.

They are less relaxed because power over time concentrated so much that the top is managing to kill the middle class and generally squeeze everyone. The same top is running huge marketing campaigns of blaming everything but them and as solution they offer authoritarianism and even more power concentration.

The public is too busy working to be able to analyze the issue correctly. Plus political education has disappeared from schools and has been methodologically deleted by the top.

sumedh3• 11 months ago

why this 'migrant' has more than them etc

Instead of framing it as “why does this migrant have more than others”, maybe it’s worth looking at the real issue: why is my job being outsourced to someone overseas?

Democracy took away that person's job and now those voters want someone authoritarian who will bring it back.

matrix2596• 11 months ago

I wonder why India has not had the same success when its in a similar situation, is the domecratic power worse than the authoritarianism ( at least in the case of China). Or would you say India will eventually catch up and be better for the democracy.

sumedh3• 11 months ago

Indian voters care more about religion, language, caste compared to development.

tananaev• 11 months ago

Authoritarian rule can work until it doesn't. It can even work better than democracy for some time because decisions can be made quickly. The problem that when it doesn't, there's no path for self-correction.

kamikazeturtles2• 11 months ago

Do we have a democracy though? If so many politicians are bought by special interests, does our system of governance allow for any path for self-correction?

tokioyoyo9• 11 months ago

I’m all for democracy, but we need to find a way for long-term commitments for nation building. If every head of state will wipe out 4-5 years of previous leadership’s work, you really can’t go far in today’s world.

krapp2• 11 months ago

That isn't a problem with every head of state, it only seems to be a problem with the US where social cohesion and national identity no longer exist, and partisan politics overrides everything. Other democracies don't have the all-powerful executive the US does, nor the innate hate and fear of effective government that the US was founded on, leading to a government designed to maximize friction and gridlock.

The US is dragged down by an archaic political system designed for a pre-industrial society of slavers that immediately devolved into a two-party binary of entrenched elites - a system the US doesn't even spread when it does nation building because it's so fundamentally broken.

So yeah, the solution here is just don't be like the US.

twilo• 11 months ago

China still burns more coal than anyone else by the way

triceratops5• 11 months ago

It has the second most number of people and next to no natural gas. What do you expect? And why is it relevant?

thombee6• 11 months ago

They're still leading the green revolution. You're criticising on of the countries doing the most for climate change because they aren't perfect. Seems might unfair

Leary2• 11 months ago

No way. I read Noah Smith (number 1 economist on substack) every week and he says one must measure China in per capita terms for all the good stuff: GDP (preferably nominal), and in aggregate terms for all the bad stuff (pollution, carbon dioxide emissions).

Also, it's logically impossible for China to be good. I have found a mathematical proof:

1: Democracy is good

2: China is not a democracy

Therefore, obviously China is not good.

layman51• 11 months ago

You did a logical fallacy which is called “denying the antecedent.” From your first two propositions, it doesn’t follow that anything that isn’t a democracy isn’t good.

pessimizer• 11 months ago

China is run by engineers, and the "West" by dimwitted amoral lawyers.

chrisco25517• 11 months ago

Our government doesn't run our economy. The private sector dwarfs the public sector.

baggy_trough• 11 months ago

Over 1/3 is quite a bit. In a sense, we are 1/3 socialist already, and that's just in direct spending, not including the mountain of red tape.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni...

trextrex• 11 months ago

I don't understand this single dimensional view of the world where one country has to be the "winner" or "best". Historically that has almost never been the case except for military might, which wasn't necessarily correlated with technological advancement. Economic size does matter, but that's eventually going to track population size. Why can't we have a multi polar world where different countries are good at different things, and no one has to dominate?

bgnn4• 11 months ago

Because at the international stage there's no rule. It's pure anarchy. This is why the countries with big military might and and economy to back it can bully the other countries into submission, or bribe them into submission (post-WW2 US and USSR did both). With this they can boost their economy, and with that their military so there's a superpower born. This is super stupid of course. What you describe requires rationality and humility. So far not happening.

runlaszlorun3• 11 months ago

Agreed. And don't get me started on the whole Thucydides Trap, whose primary trap is that assuming war is inevitable based on conflicts from centuries ago will, in fact, become a stupidly self-fulfilling prophecy.

AuthAuth3• 11 months ago

Its not about dominating its the constant competition. Growth and power makes it easier to grow more and become more powerful. If you stay in your lane you limit how you can grow and then the guy who didnt stay in their lane has grown bigger and can now influence and push you around.

You could have an equal balance of power but both sides would still be competing to match each other and it could be upset at any moment.

m0llusk• 11 months ago

The high speed rail comparison is a good example of how this view is as flawed as the idea that China makes cheap crap. China spent around a trillion dollars worth of conjured financial assets on their high speed rail network. The result has some very positive qualities but also ongoing cost overruns, many incidents including quite a few deaths, and spotty service on routes that turned out to have inconsistent demand. Now the bills are coming due, revenues are way down, the country is in a large downturn, and the future is cloudy. We will see how things play out, but the idea that China has a great rail network only really stands if you ignore all the issues with debt, maintenance, and disappointing utilization.

danny_codes• 11 months ago

If china went with cars like the US did instead of rail they’d have 10s of thousands of excess deaths a year.

thombee6• 11 months ago

Does public transport, which acts to serve the public, NEED to generate revenue? Of course its good if they do, but don't see it as a prerequisite.

Idk about you, but I would rather have an excess of underutilised rail then the 0km of high speed rail that is in my country.

sharpshadow• 11 months ago

No mentions yet that China is ruled by a communist party inspired by the Russian Revolution. Russia and China opened their market but remained in socialism. The key takeaway I would say is that their primary interest is making their country great whereas in the West it’s private families lineages which want to control as much as possible globally sacrificing whatever it takes even whole countries for their interests.

The war on corruption in China[0] is noteworthy where by 2023 “2.3 million government officials have been prosecuted”.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-corruption_campaign_und...

neonrider2• 11 months ago

But China proved you can pair authoritarian politics with a market economy. It offers a bargain we thought impossible: prosperity without freedom, development without democracy, safety without expansive civil liberties. And for the billions of people who remember being hungry, who want their kids to have better lives, who care more about rising wages than free speech—it's getting harder to argue they're wrong.

Author sounds like someone on their way from a week-end in the Huxleyan London of Brave New World. Everything was so beautiful. Freedom? Fuck that.

torginus• 11 months ago

This reads like an exercise in how many pro-West and anti-China cliches can we fit into an article.

Buttons8402• 11 months ago

I know I have politics brain, but I have to turn things to socioeconomic politics:

If we're going to compete with a free market against China's hybrid-communism, then we should do things that enable the strengths of a free market to be realized.

If our free market is a Magic The Gathering deck, it's like we're a blue deck that refuses to put any blue mana into the deck. Our deck isn't losing because it has bad ideas, it's because we weren't willing to put any of the supporting cards into play.

Patents are mostly used by large companies to protect themselves against smaller companies that could be more efficient. We choose to use patents in a way that stifles new competition. We refuse to put the "efficient new competitor" card in our deck.

Intellectual property lasts for--what?--150 years these days. Ridiculous.

What about labor vs capital? Income is taxed more than capital gains. This is not based on economic theory or anything, this is just a decision we've made. We have chosen to value moving money and capital around more than working and building things.

What about the "free" in free market?

Do we make it easy for laborers to move around freely? Nope.

We have weak social safety nets. Healthcare is tied to employment as though those who are not working a traditional job deserve to die.

We allow Jimmy John's to include non-complete clauses to prevent their workers from making sandwiches for a company that pays more.

We also allow a form of indentured servitude via "TRAPs"[0] which prevent workers from moving freely in the market.

We're trying to compete as a free market without allowing most of the things that make free markets effective because they would be inconvenient for those who already have wealth and power.

When the private data of millions of people is leaked twice a month, nobody cares--or rather, nobody with power to do something about it cares.

When giant companies fail because they made bad decisions, we bail them out, thus eliminating the opportunity for new and smarter companies to grow.

Our law making system seems completely unable to change any of these things and has devolved into one man making unpredictable threats and orders that are probably illegal and unenforceable, but most just follow them anyways.

What does it mean when the things that happen in a healthy free market aren't happening?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905728

elric2• 11 months ago

The final paragraphs were the more interesting ones IMO. Especially the closing sentence:

The tragedy isn’t that China is winning, it’s that the West stopped imagining better futures.

This one hits close to home. I saw an improvement in quality of life between the 90s and maybe 2005, but not so much since then. Not to say that there hasn't been progress, I mean tablets and pervasive internet & smartphone usage was unthinkable back then. But my life isn't any better for them. Cities feel worse, more congested, less money for public transport, more littering. Nature is disappearing all around me. Energy is WAY more expensive. Food quality is worse. Pollution seems worse. Hell, people seem worse, somehow?

Maybe this is all the disenchantment of middle age (or slumbering depression). But I haven't seen any political projects that fill me with joy in a very long time. Only dread. From shitty "free" trade agreements to Chat Control. Pouring more concrete and reducing train services. Endless austerity because we can no longer afford healthcare and/or pensions.

Yet at the same time, economic growth has mostly kept going, but it isn't translating to improved quality of life for Average Joe.

antifa• 11 months ago

2010 is the year I personally go with. I could be too young to realize it actually started in 2005.

Either way, "no longer trying" is how I would describe the US leadership over the last 2 (or more!) decades.

jay_kyburz• 11 months ago

It was the point where people stopped listening to people who know what they are talking about, and instead to other idiots on social media, and "news" that was given a strong slant to appeal to a particular audience.

Democracy can't work when people don't have a functioning 4th estate.

Herring2• 11 months ago

Yet at the same time, economic growth has mostly kept going, but it isn't translating to improved quality of life for Average Joe.

Yes ... money has diminishing returns on happiness. Americans often have a really hard time understanding and accepting this.

Ask your favorite frontier LLM what Americans should be doing to improve their quality of life, based on what we know works in other rich countries.

elric2• 11 months ago

Not an American and am not in the US, so I have no idea what your snarky comment was meant to accomplish.

missedthecue• 11 months ago

It's interesting you say energy has been getting more expensive. I was just thinking the other day how crazy it is that i've been paying about ~$3 a gallon since 07-08. It's remarkable actually.

4gotunameagain• 11 months ago

This is a US only phenomenon owed to the petrodollar and the countless wars, coups and atrocities the US has carried out for oil.

pornel• 11 months ago

Maybe it's not a coincidence that public services got worse when everything moved online.

In the process lots of things have been captured by private companies that consolidated and got richer and more powerful than many countries.

Now we have a bunch of rent seekers who don't support our local economies, but pour profits through Bermuda-Luxembourg money funnels into their Scrooge McDuck vaults.

jameslk2• 11 months ago

We were told that democracy and development go together. That free markets require free politics. That our system was the "end of history."

People and development go together. The more people you have, the more development you can have. India is experiencing a similar early growth trajectory (from a GDP and energy use perspective), because like China, they have over a billion people. Comparatively, the US for example, has a few hundred million people.

Historically, this has always been the case. China and India were the most populated places and biggest economies for much of the past several millennia

What held China and India back the past few centuries? The west, through its Opium wars and colonialism. Globalization accelerated a reversion to the mean

The takeaway here shouldn't be to end democracy and turn to state capitalism or mercantilism. For the US to keep up, it will need more people. Or AGI I guess

tokioyoyo9• 11 months ago

It can have the same trajectory, but no city in India can match an average T3 city in China in terms of QoL. Some countries, I think, are just doing better at utilizing their resources and sheer number of people than others.

jameslk2• 11 months ago

QoL is one measure sure, but I'd consider it a lagging indicator. I look at GDP growth rate and energy usage to get a better idea of where things are headed

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42295

stego-tech• 11 months ago

Thumbing through the comments here really smacks of denial and desperation, like ideology somehow on its own will win out in the end. That the ideals of democracy, and free speech, and liberty will inevitably win out over authoritarianism just because, well, they will.

What ideologues often forget is that their beliefs don’t pay rent. They don’t feed the hungry, they don’t create economic growth, they don’t solve problems. Yes, democracy is phenomenal and I think that direct democracy is the current peak governance model out there, but look at how easily Western Democracies have been captured by capital, how western economies lost the plot of the long game and failed to solve problems because they’re so myopically focused on next quarter growth at all costs and shareholder returns. We point our fingers at the abuse of the Uyghurs by China and prison labor, but conveniently ignore the migrants crossing the Mediterranean that our countries let drown, or the immigrants being kidnapped by governments, or the American prison industrial complex’s outsized impact on non-white communities, or NATO’s abuse of and complicity in the genocide of Muslims and Arabs. We crow about Chinese mass surveillance while feeding Meta, Google, Palantir, and the NSA with all our data.

Which is to say, we actually aren’t that different.

And when you begrudgingly swallow that uncomfortable truth, you begin to see how we’re objectively worse off now and in the near future than our Chinese peers. Our infrastructure crumbles because we allowed Capital to neglect it, while China’s whisks its citizenry around quickly and efficiently using EVs and HSR. Our employment markets are similar in struggles for the youth and the cost of living crisis, yet China at least acknowledges the issue and attempts to support its people while Western governments embrace austerity and blame labor for being robbed by Capital. Whilst Capital decries over-regulation as hindering its prosperity here, Chinese firms flourish under a far more strict regime because they understand politics is a fool’s errand for entities designed to make goods or provide services.

I love what China has done, even if I’m disgusted with the horrors it has wrought on others to achieve it. Where I differ from others is that I’m not naive enough to believe we’re assured victory simply based on ideology, morals, or ethics alone, nor do I engage in the denialism so many worship when cheerleading anti-DEI, anti-science, and anti-labor talking points in a vain attempt to boost personal worth at the expense of others.

This is the last real chance for Western governments to establish, at the very least, a balance with China in the century ahead. China still needs western R&D, western technologies, western patents, and western money, at least for the time being.

Once they have a competitive navy? Once they’ve transitioned to renewables? Once they’ve closed their supply chains and can recycle their waste into new products? Once they’ve solved the hard problems Capital never can, because they’re not immediately profitable to do so?

Then we’re cooked.

bgnn4• 11 months ago

Most people don't realize but the biggest thing China has going on for it is the start-up scene in semiconductors.

There's too much focus on the chip production in the news, but the industry ecosystem is much bigger than that. Especially chip design and design automation are stagnated fields in the West because of the limited talent pool and lack of investment. You guys here are used to all the VC money, but in HW development world the story is different. There's simply a lack of investors to put down 10s of millions with 5-10 years horizon. Couple this with lack of talent: there aren't enough EE graduates with necessary training, you get a bleak situation. So most if the industry relies on foreigners from developing countries: Iran, China, India, Bangladesh.. Now that those Chinese EEs have better prospects at home, most of them are returning back to China to start their own companies.

Similar trend is happening in design automation tools. We have 3 monopolies in the West extracting 20-30 peecent of the revenue from the semicon companies. There are competitors showing up in China. They aren't on par yet but it's just SW, so it's a matter of time. Since there's competition their pricing is so much better too. Unfortunately we don't have access to these SW, but Chinese companies do.

runlaszlorun3• 11 months ago

Interesting point. Would you say the US chip sanctions have given even more incentive for China?

anonzzzies5• 11 months ago

They have been pushing for independence for a while now but sanctions and tarrifs will push it all to go faster. And it is a big mistake: the west has some type of misplaced arrogance that china wont catch up that fast because asml, nvidia etc but I would not be so sure. Like more said here: a disadvantage is authoritarian but thats also an advantage: Xi can just command everyone to go one way and 'defeat the west'. And seems he is doing exactly that.

bgnn4• 11 months ago

Yes. It's the best thing happened for the Chinese semiconductor ecosystem. All those Chinese phones, networking equipment etc can't risk using the suppliers in the West as it can be shut down with a decree. Now Huawei, Xiaomi etc are funding so many start-ups and they are buying their products even if it's slightly worse than the state-of-the-art. The next generation of chips are going to be state-of-the-art for sure as there's not much of a gap.

Chinese companies used to open design offices in the West to keep connected to the talent here. In the last 6 months they're massively divesting. This means EEs in China will be valued even more. Add this to 80% of the research in the field happening in Chinese universities now (as opposed to less than 10% 20 years ago), they have everything nicely aligned.

anigbrowl2• 11 months ago

This breaks our Western discourse. We were told that democracy and development go together. That free markets require free politics. That our system was the "end of history."

Numerous people were at pains to point out how these assumptions were overbroad or outright wrong, but could not get a hearing. In the US, people are heavily propagandized from childhood to believe that the United States is the greatest country in the world. Most other countries don't do this. They have national pride, people will casually say their country is the best, but they mean it in the sense of it being their favorite, not as some objective fact. They don't do daily pledges of allegiance at schools or sing the national anthem at every single sports fixture. This is a recipe for cognitive dissonance.

Now of course people debate things online, in the media, and in academia, but often ideas that go against the grain are just entertained as polite abstractions compared to the greatest-country-in-the-world 'reality'. You can see this very clearly in politics, where a lot of people in Congress just don't really understand of believe perspectives that don't align with this default, and that goes a long way toward explaining how we have so many political actors that are increasingly and often aggressively detached from reality.

The United States would have become a superpower regardless of what political system it adopted. If you give a bunch of settlers with relatively advanced technology access to an entire continent that's geographically isolated and only thinly populated by indigenous people with simpler technology, and that continent is rich in natural resources, the settlers and their descendants are going to prosper. The US constituted itself as a republic out of pragmatism; even if the founders had wanted to establish an American monarchy, they couldn't very well have instituted one based on the divine right of kings while repudiating their existing remote monarch. The British empire, constituted on a very different basis, continued to prosper for another 150 years after the US detached itself.

In both cases, the countries had overwhelming strategic advantages; isolation and unspoiled resources in the American case, technological and naval superiority in the British. The foundational ethos on which the polity is run and which holds the population together is important, of course, but any ethos will do as long as the population is willing to go along with it.

I don't think China's current conditions are the product of communism especially - as many have pointed out, they have something more akin to state capitalism now. The authoritarian structures in Chinese society have roots going back ~2200 years, to when the state of Qin managed to establish imperial authority and a centralized state with a bureaucracy and national political infrastructure instead of a feudal system. That centralized state has mutated or broken down numerous times over the centuries but has always been re-established in some form or other because it provided more general advantage to the polity as well as its rulers. About 1500 years they instituted imperial examination systems, which recruited state officials through merit rather than ancestry or wealth.

Modern China adopted communism partly to throw off the shackles of colonial powers; my shallow take is that coming under the partial control of western nations like Britain and Germany induced a sort of culture-shock paralysis, but being further subjugated by their upstart neighbors from Japan (which country's name is synonymous with shortness/weakness in the Chinese language) shook them out of it. Communists were able to combine nationalist sentiment with the long-standing disaffections of the peasantry and a solid grasp of insurgent military tactics, during a period when other great powers were distracted by warring with each other. Following WW2 they speedran the industrial revolution: while the human costs were atrocious, I'm not sure that they were actually worse than those in the west, just more concentrated in time. Now they've speedrun consumer and technological economic development and exploring their imperial/hegemonic opportunities, a process which will play out for another 1-2 centuries, if history is any guide: https://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf

said guide is a heuristic rather than a rule, of course; ancient Egyptian civilization is thought to have persisted for about 3000 years. You live in closer historical proximity to Cleopatra than she did to the first builders of pyramids.

To wrap up, my basic point is that Chinese authoritarianism isn't a product of communism so much as a reconstruction of a centralized state that has served the country for millenia, about 8 times longer than American society has existed. Nor do I think it's 'eating the world'; rather, China is resuming its historical place as a hegemonic power and is merely eating America's lunch. This is understandably unsettling to American strategic thinkers, some of whom had fallen into the trap of believing their own hype about a unipolar world in recent decades, and others of whom viewed China's ascendancy in manichean terms due to communism rather than looking at it in systematic terms and considering as simply a continuation of long-running historical patterns accelerated by technological change.

dhjhdskj• 11 months ago

The author’s case leans on survivorship bias and correlation/causation fallacies. China is portrayed as proof that authoritarianism “works,” while the long list of failed or stagnant dictatorships (Soviet Union, fascist states, much of the post-colonial world) is ignored.

Success is attributed to repressive and uninclusive government sytems rather than to the far more decisive factors: market reforms, foreign capital, and global trade integration. By collapsing this complexity into a single flattering story about centralized control, the piece functions more as an ideology and propaganda piece than a real good faith analysis of China's root causes of success.

The narrative also erases China’s structural advantages: the world’s largest labor force and vast natural resources that made global dominance in manufacturing and supply chains possible. These advantages would likely have delivered major growth under democracy, and possibly with less fragility, failure, and human rights abuse. By crediting authoritarianism instead, the article smuggles in a propagandistic message: authoritarian control isn’t incidental but necessary for technological and societal success. Bullshit!

int_19h2• 11 months ago

Author is specifically saying that authoritarian capitalism can be made to work.

ciconia• 11 months ago

This worries me. I greatly value Western ideals—freedom of speech, democracy, individual rights. These things matter.

Hmm I don't know about those so called "western values" - seems to me there's a lot of hypocrisy in western nations, where we look down on so called authoritarian societies as wrong or even evil. As TFA says, it looks like the Chinese government is delivering for its people, while it's clear that western democracies are not.

kurtis_reed• 11 months ago

What's the "eating" part though?

esbranson2• 11 months ago

Good?

So they can give back to the world. They've destroyed countless Chinese in the process, but that's not our problem. Complaining about trains when cheap air travel is available to even the poor is peak academia. Complaining about semiconductors to several generations who grew up on the Internet and iPhone doubly so.

Anyone who has China lust should move there, the same for anyone with a burning lust for communism, give up their Western citizenship, and put their ignorance—oops I mean foresightedness—to the test. In fact, it's too bad we can't deport people there (eg wannabe communists). For the rest of us, Google Street View (of China versus, say, anywhere else), Walmart, and a healthy understanding of the difference between real life and Substack should suffice.

thombee6• 11 months ago

You're very ideologically inflexible. Instead of engaging with other modes of development / forms of government, youre just telling them to leave your country.

Why don't you open your mind a bit, and learn from the experiences of others

esbranson2• 11 months ago

learn from the experiences of others

They are wrong. Here they can be wrong and survive, there they cannot. By law. We learn what we can from the laogai ren/laogai fan (劳改犯). (Thought criminals, laogai being reeducation camps.)

ideologically inflexible

Perhaps. At any given time, possibly, but over time I think I disagree with you.

CrackerNews• 11 months ago

Authoritarian vs democracy is too overly simplistic a framework, IMO. More rather it is Chinese Marxist-Leninist democratic centralism vs Western liberal representative republics.

The Communist Party of China obtains and centralizes authority from the lower layers to the upper layers, but the Chinese leaves the implementation details of its five-year plans at the local level. The political incentive is to make your bosses and subordinates look good, so they don't lose the mandate to reign to another clique in the party. Of course there was the example of the USSR failing to succeed in the global stage, but the Chinese variant is working in interpreting Marxism and Leninism to the Chinese 21st century.

Meanwhile, the Western model was based on prior enlightenment and humanist ideals before Marxist critique of 19th century capitalism. The idea was that an enlightened populace would be able to democratically elect representatives to best represent themselves and their interests as opposed to a king, but the West after capitalism is largely setup to reward international capitalist incentives over other national interests.

However, the two worlds are interdependent on each other. It was the first world outsourcing its manufacturing to this second world that led to its current prosperity. The first world instead pursued services and financialization.

thombee6• 11 months ago

One of the only reasonable comments in this thread full of ignorance

gp904• 11 months ago

The tragedy isn’t that China is winning, it’s that the West stopped imagining better futures

This one hits close to home. Case in point, many people on HN argue that having fewer goods and higher prices is part of being an developed country. I think it's deadly wrong. A hallmark of a modern industrialized society is to make once-expensive products accessible to the majority of the people, if not everyone. That's how we got electricity, got clean water, got food like butter (which only wealthy families could afford), got cars, got iphone, got all kinds of appliances, and got amazing infrastructure. And somehow now it's okay to accept that China can manufacture and build faster, and cheaper, and better?

quantum_state• 11 months ago

Democracy as an ideal is not what is being practiced here in the US, at least in the last twenty or so years. People hacked the supreme court, hacked the media to con the voters for vote, big money comes into the mix, etc., no wonder it is not working as it should be.

alon_honig• 11 months ago

And they still don't have clean tap water. Like anywhere. Even tier 1 cities. Outside of a few routes The high speed trains are less convient than airports (but due to subsidies much cheaper). Quality of construction is horrible and by local standards house prices are extremely high. Basic Healthcare is pretty good but many procedures (i.e. hospitalization) are out of reach for the majority of the population. White collar Fraud is rampant (my friend had his bank account frozen because his name sounds like someone else). Their top tier apps are often crashing (seriously Chinese people have all sorts of tricks to force reboot an app) and overall not up to western standards.

China is great but it is still a middle income country like Thailand or Malaysia. It's sheer size means that there will be pockets of innovation in a sea of what is overall suboar by western standards. There is definitely things that the west can learn from china (like the value of hard work and getting things done) and some of their tech (like batteries ) is leading edge but we have to put things in perspective. Every civilization will have it's advantages and disadvantages. There is no superior system. For the west (especially Europe) we need to embrace change. That is something that the Chinese truly lead the world.

evolighting• 11 months ago

It's nothing about China, point out in that article, it is "China Doesn't Need Us Anymore."

because, Some people in China they don't care what "THE WORLD" care, So, "THEY ARE ALIENS", that’s what this is all about.

ornel• 11 months ago

Indeed, "the West stopped imagining better futures". But authoritarian capitalism isn't the only alternative out there. Millions of indigenous people around the world are living in many "alternative" societies, many of them very functional and delivering happiness and prosperity. It may be wise to check them out

dissent• 11 months ago

This sounds suspiciously like the "noble savage" myth perpetuated by imperialists during the colonial era. Guessing which context you intended your comment to be read in, I can't help but find that a little ironic.

Nevermark2• 11 months ago

We were told that democracy and development go together. That free markets require free politics. That our system was the "end of history."

Only two parties (of practical importance), each with its power highly centralized (one perhaps more than the other), isn't actually very democratically friendly in terms of choice. Or policy idea evolution/recombination. And from a "democracy" PR perspective, it's not going so well either.

A healthy democracy, where ideas and candidates have more sources and competition, would be much more likely to be development friendly/capable/consistent.

grafmax• 11 months ago

But China proved you can pair authoritarian politics with a market economy. It offers a bargain we thought impossible: prosperity without freedom

It seems like politicians in liberal democracies are giving up on democracy and turning to authoritarianism instead.

But since 2008 it’s become clear to many people that these liberal democracies are actually governments owned by the upper class.

It’s not that politicians are turning away from democracy. They are throwing the mask off. What they envy is the ability to exercise power without disguising it.

That’s not going to cure our problems. It’s actually the narrow self-interested decisions of the upper class that have landed us in this state of decline.

lmm4• 11 months ago

There's a big difference between surpassing the US and dominating the world. To the US, not being able to at least plausibly claim to be Top Nation is an threat to your core psychological identity; to most of us it's Tuesday.

The downsides of Chinese authoritarianism are very real. I wouldn't want to live there. But the west is increasingly unable to deliver on things that are lower down on the hierarchy of needs. Crime and personal safety, infrastructure maintenance, homes within commuting distance of jobs. It's not so much that we need to dream bigger as that we need to stop sawing off our own legs with the basics.

Plus when decades of "democracy" can't deliver things the majority wants - like reduced immigration - people will rightly ask what good it is to anyone.

tkel3• 11 months ago

Democracy is only in the political arena, in the US the economy is organized as dictatorships. So it's unsurprising that the economic results are not good for the majority of people. Because all businesses are organized as dictatorships, they are not controlled by the majority of people. Same way political dictatorships did not deliver what people wanted, they deliver what dictators want.

p3rls• 11 months ago

has HN always been this bad

amai6• 11 months ago

The rich are eating the world. China just helps to increase the difference between poor and rich by offering slavery as a service.

amai6• 11 months ago

Taiwan is the better China. It shows you can have a good economy, good infrastructure and a world class democracy at the same time. There is no need to make compromises on human rights to be successful economically.

mogreator• 11 months ago

Until Taiwan become new HonKong and get reincorporated to China.

amai6• 11 months ago

Did Hongkong economy improve since it belongs to China? Not at all:

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/economy/2024/1/26/in-hong-kong...

I think especially Hongkong shows how Chinas dictatorship is actually holding it's economy back. If China would be a free country they would rule the world since a long time ago. But thanks to the iron grip of the communist party China will never be able to reach its full potential.

erxam2• 11 months ago

Taiwan is not only subsidized by the US as a bulwark against China, but saying there's no need to compromise on human rights is a fucking joke.

Taiwan is a militantly far-right dangerous country which has colluded and collaborated with cruel dictatorships as much as Israel or the US itself.

Look up Fu Hsing Kang college or the World Anti-Communist League, for example. They have zero moral standing of any kind.

For more modern examples, the last few remaining Latin American countries with ties to Taiwan only do so because Taiwan is handing over bags and bags of cash to ultra-conservative oligarchs and to the political elite, buying their compliance even at the expense of the general economy. This, coupled with the fact that the US is closing off all doors, means that average people lose out on a LOT of opportunities of both trade and development with China. And what is there to show off for it? Absolutely fucking nothing at all.

I love Taiwan. Don't you?

amai6• 11 months ago

Good morning, Beijing!

Which VPN are you using to access Hackernews from China?

user____name• 11 months ago

Barrington Moore Jr.: Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Origins_of_Dictatorship...

haozes• 11 months ago

As a Chinese person, I feel that the term "communism" is somewhat demonized in the West. In reality, not many people in China believe in it either. It might be similar to Christianity; I believe there aren’t too many people in Europe and the U.S. who genuinely adhere to it. I'm not entirely sure if it's the same kind of logic.

Recently, I was watching a documentary about World War II (made by Americans) and was shocked by how severe the casualties were in the war between Germany and the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front, in contrast to the Western Front. Ideology seems to be a primary culprit in that tragedy.

I also watched a documentary about the Vietnam War (also made by Americans) and couldn't understand why the U.S. engaged in that war, sacrificing so many lives simply out of fear of the vague notion of communism. Decades later, we can see that not much happened as a result of that fear.

Most of the time, I feel that people are not so different from one another. There may be slight variations in thought, but those differences are minuscule.

I completely don’t understand why U.S.-China relations have worsened in recent years; it seems very absurd to me. All the mutual hatred stemming from ideological differences is just nonsense, similar to the animosity that exists between different religions—it's all nonsense.

China is eating the world

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