I've spent some time near Washington politics. It gave me the opionion that our system is purposefully designed to create gridlock in order to tie up political energies. Political energies that would have otherwise been used to create rapid change. I think the entire point is to create a relatively stable climate for business investment.

So that's the exact opposite philosophy as how you described the Chinese system. Central planning and proactive decisions made by a few vs. market driven and reactive desisions made by many.

I'm not even sure if it's possible to determine which system is better or what the exact best middle ground would be. It may have complexity beyond our scientific tools' ability to study.

An oligarchy is efficient but can be oppressive. Also, the ancient Greeks figured that an oligarchy naturally evolved into an even more efficient government, a dictatorship (see Xi's purges of rivals, and preparing the stage to retain power indefinitely). And a dictatorship eventually always ends up in the hands of an incapable, uncaring, or downright cruel person, leading to misery for everyone.

My understanding is that was why we put so many checks and balances in the US government, we'd rather do things our own complicated way than submit to a tyrant.

The only problem would be if the US system becomes so weak that it was vulnerable to being conquered by a tyrannical system that was at the height of its power.

The flip side of this is, once a few bad decisions seep into the legal system, its incredibly hard to take them out. Which sets the country many years back while others develop rapidly.

When thinking about things like unsustainable growth rate and ghost cities in China I think that is the negative side of the top down model of central control. The ability to change policy quickly might be a benefit but I don't think we will know the true result in terms of benefit to civilization or country until we can look back and compare systems in the future.

Not when capital is not spread out evenly enough. And even then, larger capital will eventually eat smaller ones and then influence gov't and risk invoking a demagog like Trump (oh we already did huh). These mega corp that are controlled by groups of people called executives will do everything to influence the opinion and desire of the people into their favor. The people barely able to feed themselves will have no time to think about climate change. This is _practically_ the same as a controlling party.

The idea of owning a piece of the earth to yourself (and inherited by your descendant) is ridiculous anyway. Resources of our planet is limited. Usable land is limited. Our population grow by the day exponentially. What happens to those who don't have access to these resources and barely have a livable life? Do you expect them to care about climate change? Now you might call me some labels since this idea is not compatible with capitalism and free market, but I would appreciate a thoughtful reply to my questions in this paragraph.

This is not borne out by the examples we've seen thus far of deregulated markets. It's important to distinguish between a free market and a deregulated market, as pundits often conflate the two so regularly.

The benefits you state, a system aligned with "the psyche and desire of the people" does not, in fact, naturally emerge from deregulated markets. Every entity participating in a market would benefit by being the only participant in that market, so they do things like externalize costs, acquire competitors and leverage network effects to grow their share of that market.

Once that state is achieved, the people hoping to have their various desires met by various participants in the market will have but a single option.

A deregulated market devolves into central control.

Something like this has been seen in the one child policy which went too far and the government is now scrambling. Also, the clumsy attempts to prop up the stock exchanges a couple of years ago have ultimately come undone. So we will see whether we have true resilience in the system, or is it actually brittle.

That is where surveillance and big data comes in.

And I am not too sure if they are scrambling at their one child policy, there are simply far too many people in china.

This has led to a ridiculous situation highlighted in the New York Times, where a woman forcibly fitted with IUDs in 2012, is now being offered free removal of the same IUD.

This is what happens when policy is made centrally, detached from ground realities. I don't know whether there are enough people or not in China - the point was more about the issues with central planning.

Similar U-turns can be seen in the stock market. The government was exhorting people to invest in the stock market as a patriotic duty, creating a huge bubble. When it burst, they tried to manage the stock market by punishing investors who were selling shares! No wonder the stock market has tanked - would you put your money in a stock market where you could be punished for selling?

I agree the Chinese government with its Orwellian-like control of the population can get away with a lot. But they get a lot wrong as well.

Democracies do have less scope for action due to checks and balances, but on the other hand if they pursue a mistaken policy, every 5 years the voters get the chance to force a change. The fact this is so means the current rulers have a strong incentive to course correct themselves as well either executively, or through an internal coup in the party in the case of parliamentary democracies. They are enormously more flexible.

The Chinese governments back handed handling of their stock market is a good example. They exercised powers far beyond those available to democratic leaders, but they were wrong headed and they persisted with them long after it was obvious they were harmful. And the same people that made these grave errors are still in charge and faced no consequences. This is a better system?

As another poster pointed out, how comfortable would you be investing if the government might decide to threaten to punish you if you try to sell?

Anyhow large Chinese techs are all listed in New York or Hongkong. Most other large Chinese companies are dual listed on the mainland and Hongkong.

Eventually the Chinese government is going to face a real, full bore economic crisis. Hopefully that’s a long way off and they will learn many lessons before then.

It's not the absolute number that's the issue it's the age distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/F...

If you believe complex economic systems follow simple, well-known control laws, then yes. But I haven't seen much evidence for this.

For lighter control look at the post war economies in Europe, Japan and Korea. Tight control of the economy worked just fine to stabilize the system.

Five year plans appear historically sketchy.

When the political power is not widely distributed, you can take care of the elites without hurting the economy.

If the top 100,000 power players and their families are shielded from the fallout, how much will that cost? Few $100 billions or so?

Meaning, that usually internal struggles will prevent the participants to be so generous, cool headed and foreward thinking.

Sure, the Politburo / Central Committee is small, but they still represent hundreds of millions of people, many different regions, cities, to a degree even many ethnic groups.

Usually shielding the elites does not show up as a goal, and differing circumstances of those can easily lead to serious opposition against the generally useful solutions.

We shall see how the current regime handles whatever history throws at them.

The only elite safe is xinjingping. Because he is the dictator

That's true at the micro scale, not the macro. Tienanmen may be fading from memory, but it happened before and it'll happen again. Those 30-person decisions have winners and losers, and the losers not being in the room doesn't mean they'll just shut up and go quietly. Nor does it mean that those 30 people are going to be insensitive to or unwilling to accommodate their needs in all cases. They know what the stakes are if they mess up, and it goes farther than poverty.

Basically: "political gridlock" looks bad, but it's a safety valve that democracies use to avoid unrest, which is a far worse problem in the long run than a debt crisis.

> Decisions are done in small groups of 30 people at most, with several hundred people having some influence.

To all the ideological responses to nokinside: don’t underestimate China. China isn’t perfect but is an incredible story.

That said, the challenges they face are enormous. I hope they can navigate through them.

Think Greece vs. Venezuela.

Also, How do you get the bureaucracy to actually do what you want?(A major recurring problem in Chinese History).

At the moment, China is only strengthening private property rights, looks like they learned that lesson.

The soviets and Mao's regimes had ample powers to do what they wanted, yet it resulted in mass murder and complete catastrophe at unprecedented scale because they made very, very poor decisions. Having leverage does not mean it fits prosperity nor crisis. Look at how soviets encouraged the killing of Kulaks which led to the great starvation (dozens of millions of deaths) in Ukraine in the following years.

https://hn.algolia.com/?amp;sort=byDate&dateRange=all&am...

Effectiveness is about achieving goals, it's quite possible to be very effective while working towards evil goals.

Yes, but it was effectively half measure anyway - they bought some time at expense of poverty and got nothing in the long run - the union is gone, poverty killed what nationalism was not able to and with fall of the union nationalism came back with 6 more millions of reasons to prove it.

Chinese have not been strongly ideological after Deng Xiaoping.

Communist party is more like ruling aristocracy with privileges. Communist party is using communism the same way as aristocracy used religion to justify their divine mandate.

What is true though is that institutionally China is much smarter about economics and less ideological than in Mao's era, but that is predicated on retaining institutional norms and memory past Xi and his ostensibly tactical rollback. It could totally work out in a worse way.

Wherever recent history has gone awry is when a few powerful people think they know what's best for everyone else.

Just like I said in other comment, Look at the post war economies in Europe, Japan, Korea etc. Wage controls, price controls, rationing etc. still a market economy and not a command economy.

Note, this is still not a suggestion to do it, for humanist reasons, which I think is mostly what the Western (cultural) objection has always been. But from a practical perspective, centralization (even totalitarianism) has been accepted as the norm in various smaller and non-governmental contexts that have also involved highly complex decision-making, e.g. the corporate employer. People seem to accept this level of de-individualization, and a strong evidentiary case has yet to be put forth that full decentralization of that relationship works out better over all.

I think it's pretty obvious by now that individuals' feelings of being 'free' are not relevant to the big picture of what nation states seek to achieve. If you tasked an AI with controlling a country to achieve arbitrary goals, you can be damn sure it would be totalitarian for maximum efficiency.

I don't support or condone totalitarian governments and I value my freedoms, however illusionary they may be. But I have no delusions about what the optimal governance structure is.

On what meaningful per capita metrics is China outpacing the Western world?

Hell yeah, America has a mass-murder problem. Its just ignorant of the fact because .. you know .. nobody likes to know how their powerful military is really being used.

Yeah, but a planned economy wasn't the reason. The reasons were:

(a) they wanted to establish their elite rule (and that required a big show of force and getting rid of potential enemies)

(b) ideology was at play (ethnic tensions, coming up with a BS "elite class" to get rid of in the form of kulacs, etc)

(c) they started from very poor rural economies very fragile to weather, famines, and such

(d) they improvised their decisions with much incomplete data from ad-hoc established regional bureaucracies.

Those are not problems with a "planned economy", but more of those particular historical circumstances.

Neither (a), (b), or (c), or (d) are the case anymore (I mean, they still need to enforce their party rule, but not establish it from nothing).

In fact China's growth in GDP the last 50+ years has been phenomenal, so it's not like "they made very, very poor decisions" for their economy over this span.

Besides, today China's economy is not at all planned the same hard way Stalin's Russia or Mao's economy was.

I strongly disagree; the above is an old shibboleth of dictators and other anti-democrats. Mussolini promised to make the train runs on time.

Authoritarian governments are actually starkly limited by the individuals with power - by their ability, their vision, their own greed and interests, and their political limitations (authoritarian power structures are not democracies; the limits are not voters and law but other power bases). When those leaders are incapable, the country fails - rule of man, not rule of law and by the people. In a democracy, the pluralism in people and inputs creates great flexibility: This especially applies to vision, a reason market economies, which factor in the vision of all, work so much better than command economies, limited to the cognitive processing of a few; it's the reason why micromanaging CEOs fail while delegating and empowering ones are so much more successful. Democracies are much more innovative politically and economically.

More generally, when one person can't do it, in a democracy others can; either others in the broad power structure do it, or the people in power are replaced. IMHO, that exact problem explains the lack of dynamism in authoritarian government, and the reason by imperial China fell so far behind the 'West' - when the emperor failed to adapt, the country was stuck with him (and his progeny) for another century. In a democracy, he'd be gone within months or at worst a few years.

Finally, corruption is an enormous problem and impediment in non-democracies, a fact long-established in Chinese histories. (IIRC, in Chinese histories the standard model of the long-term political cycle is the ascendancy of a new power, then its decline due to corruption, then chaos, then it repeats.) Policy is not driven by serving the voters, a necessity in democracies, but by those in power serving themselves.

Finally, reality does not bear out the strong-man theory: Without question the best performing economies historically are liberal democracies. China remains - and many believe will remain without liberal democracy - a poor country compared with the liberal democracies. Everything the Chinese dictatorship does well economically, from monetary policy to market capitalism to universal education, are innovations of liberal democracies. The most economically successful parts of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, are liberal democracies (speaking very broadly about Hong Kong - the complexities there are out of scope in this comment).

(This is not a knock on the people of China. I dream of the day they will be set free to run their own lives - it's hard to imagine the innovation of a billion people set free with those incredible cultural resources at their disposal.)