The way I see it: in China politics/policy are largely steered by big money (companies) + the emperor. The only difference I see with the West is that the emperor of the West is less powerful than Xi.
The "nice" thing about a totalitarian king/emperor/dictator is that improvements in prosperity come quickly. The disadvantage is that the fall also comes quickly (easy example: Mao).
Aren't the root issues as simple as that? I mean this is not exactly the first time in history that we saw "The West" V.S. dictatorships. It's also not the first time that we saw a powerful Chinese totalitarian regime make the country very wealthy and then poor again. To clarify: regarding that last sentence I'm talking about the past 2500 years or so.
Don't dictatorships by their nature come with massive corruption and eventual downfall. Or is that my - just world fallacy - talking?
Not at all. The '"nice" thing about a totalitarian king/emperor/dictator is that improvements in prosperity come quickly' has historically almost never been the case.
It is actually quite anomalous for a non-democracy to see these sorts of quality of life improvements.
> easy example: Mao
Mao is not such an easy example, given that there is a continuity of government from Mao to today.
> also not the first time that we saw a powerful Chinese totalitarian regime make the country very wealthy and then unwealthy again.
??? No past Chinese regime has the numbers that the modern CCP is getting. Just look at the number in China in absolute poverty over the last 100 years.
Honestly, your comment seems remarkably ill-informed.
Last 100 years? I was thinking more towards the last 2500 years or so of Chinese and Western history. Will edit my previous comment to clarify.
> It is actually quite anomalous for a non-democracy to see these sorts of quality of life improvements.
Could you give some counter examples to these non-democracies that went from 0 to very powerful (in terms of geo-politics, economy and science and technology) in a matter of decades: various kingdoms before the year 0 (Syrians, Persians, Babylonians, etc), the Romans during and after Ceasar, the old world European exploring kingdoms (Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, English), old Chinese Dynasties, modern Singapore, China, USSR.
So what do you mean "The '"nice" thing about a totalitarian king/emperor/dictator is that improvements in prosperity come quickly' has historically almost never been the case."??
Given that outside of Greece, the Roman republic, Italian city-states, and a few other exceptions - every single one of thousands of regimes was non-democratic for thousands of years, it seems like those are anomalous and your comment is shot through with historical survivorship bias.
> Could you give some counter examples to these non-democracies that went from 0 to very powerful
I'm also just pretty unconvinced by these examples. I would have agreed if you had said, dictatorships tend to be much more militarily aggressive and expansionary, but I disagree that that results in quality of life improvement.
I don't think any of those examples lifted anywhere close to the same proportion of their population out of poverty. China lifted 880 million out of poverty.
Fair point. Maybe. Maybe not. What I mean is: it's hard to compare the outcome of democracies and non-democracies, because in my view the only country that has ever existed to come close to the concept of democracy in the history of humanity is Switzerland. And even that one has plenty of non-democratic aspects. Sample size: 1...
Other countries don't come close IMO. I don't agree that your examples where anything close enough to democracy. Not even Greece (where only the upper caste of society was allowed to vote, forget slaves etc).
And that's not even considering the fact that we essentially have sample size 0 if we want to compare large true democracies to large totalitarian states.
> but I disagree that that results in quality of life improvement.
Improvement compared to what? Tribal societies? Anarchy? Democracy? It is a fact that many societies that fell into dictatorship had an undeniable improvement in quality of life for the masses (compared to whatever previous society they had), but then also a massive decrease in quality of life eventually (or the other way around or in cycles, etc). And it can happen relatively quickly within years/decades. That was kind of my previous point: totalitarian regimes are efficient in ramping up, but such a system has no way to be stable, because the entire power pyramid depends on 1 person at the top (and a whoooooole lot of manipulative butt-licking corruption down the chain). Nice competent person = instant nice society. Evil/crazy/sick person (possibly the same person that started out nice) = instant hell.
> I don't think any of those examples lifted anywhere close to the same proportion of their population out of poverty. China lifted 880 million out of poverty.
China, the very same political/military system, also got those same people into poverty in the first place in a matter of years/decades (killing up to some 60 million people in the process) through Mao. Again, my point exactly: totalitarian regimes are good at ramping up quickly and messing up equally quickly.
They've quickly gone into poverty before, they can do it again. There's only 1 person between China being "great" and China being nothing in a matter of years/decades. And that's the point I was trying to make before.
> China, the very same political/military system, also got those same people into poverty in the first place in a matter of years/decades (killing up to some 60 million people in the process) through Mao
This is just very not true. You're saying there were tons of people making over $2/hr pre-CCP, they then got pushed into poverty by Mao, and all of the poverty gains since then are just raising out the people who got pushed down.
There is absolutely no empirical evidence for that assertion.
But I don't think the parent was far off with what they said. The advantage of the authoritarian is that there's no red tape for them, whatsoever. This power can be directed for practical reasons like building a gigantic wall around your borders, or selfish reasons like erecting gigantic pyramids to retain your wealth and status in the afterlife.
> It is actually quite anomalous for a non-democracy to see these sorts of quality of life improvements.
This seems like survivorship bias to me. It's easy to point to NK or the Soviet Union or China under Mao as failed authoritarian states. But these were also extremely experimental and it's not hard to imagine that the current incarnation of Chinese authoritarianism is one that has learned from the last one's mistakes. Most of the quality of life improvements that were seen in the west in the 20th century were thanks to technological improvements stemming from the industrial revolution. China is going through an industrial revolution of their own right now. So was it actually because of democracy that the west saw so much improvement last century?
> Honestly, your comment seems remarkably ill-reformed.
Extremely rude.
China is at the mercy of bad decisions made by its single unopposed leader - in a quest to command fear, it's needlessly antagonizing pretty much all its neighbors, which seems to me like a result of flawed leadership.
How bad a decision can Xi (just use it as an example) make?
The Chinese system is bad. But it cannot make the same mistake as what US is making right now. Even during SARS, that worse version of the Chinese system did not make things as bad as what US is currently making.
> the strength of the West is that it's largely leaderless, and its "regional" leaders regularly gets switched out, so even a bad leader cannot leave much long-lasting harm.
This is hilariously illogical thinking.
The selection of leader is through merits and competency. If the pool of candidates were bad, swapping out frequently did nothing to help the situation.
The strength of the west is that its rationale thinking and openness to debate and challenges have helped the nations to collectively think out and plot the optimal path to future.
Swapping out "bad" leaders is not even relevant in the context of open debate and collaborative thinking. In such a system, it's not possible to have "bad" leader.
Xi takes advises more openly from intellectuals than probably any world leader. Examples: Xi asked his leadership group to study Block-chain and Quantum tech [1,2]. Can you imagine Trump keep silence in such a meeting without claiming he knows the subject better than anyone else?!
[1] http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/leaders/2019-10/25/c_11251... [2] http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2020-10/17/c_1126623288.ht...
The internet was originally a DoD project, after all. Every industrial country tries to take a slice in the next big technology, but of course the predictions are hit-and-miss.
I mean, blockchain, really?
...
Blockchain is a gimmick for startup, but it's quite useful as an infrastructure, just like what Internet was.
Nor is central planning leadership necessary. The early United States overtook Great Britain as the largest economy with minimal central planning leadership.
There is no formal central planning.
The early US presidents are very conscious of the prospect of the nation. They purposely expand the land, clear out regional security threats through wars, deliberately prioritize economical prosper over the claimed moral high grounds (slavery), foster rule by law and encourage participatory democracy.
All these polices are markedly more coherent and centralized than modern day US policies.
You should view totalitarian as a tool to achieve uniformity and consensus. But not disregard uniformity and consensus as being unnecessary foundation of strong nations.
Plus, democracy is a mechanism to reach consensus in a human way, and should always be the most effective and efficient one, if citizens are informed and capable of independent thinking. The rationale men were not only the foundation of free market, they are equally important for democracy. When US leaders purposely dumb down their citizens, they are undermining the very foundation of the strength of democracy.
Markets are fundamentally pretty different from when the US overtook GB as largest economy.
This is why political philosophy is important. The United States was largely an experiment in political philosophy and it succeeded... temporarily.
Unfortunately, given that the modern world is largely run by either state-managed socialism or state-managed capitalism (neo-mercantilism), there will be no evidence to evaluate your hypothesis on Earth unless there is a mass depopulation (let's hope not).
In my opinion, we will only have new political experimentation and innovation after we become a multi-planetary species. Political experimentation on Earth is too risky.
Until then, pay your taxes to appease the increasingly dystopian and insatiable "leaders".
There's no private property without "central planning" (as you characterize it) of some form.
Please don't combine further arguments (which suggest you want to continue the dialogue) with a poisoning of the well. I've enjoyed our mini-conversation so far; if you don't, that's fine, but there's no added value in this part of your sentence.
> Your characterization of the US as "centrally planned"
In my opinion, the key metrics of central planning are the size of government (e.g. % GDP) and volume of its regulation. The point at which these become excessively centrally planned is hard to define. In my opinion, they have been consistently growing over the past few hundred years in the U.S. and are about 50% and excessive, respectively. I doubt they will cease to stop growing until collapse or malaise.
> There's no private property without "central planning" (as you characterize it) of some form.
I did mention "minimal" central planning; however, again, you're making an assertion of political philosophy. I do not believe private property requires central planning. See: The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer for example.
This is such a big reason. We no longer identify under a single identity. In America, that would be identifying as an American. In Europe, people still don't really identify as being European before they identify as English, French, German, etc.
Between both America and Europe, we no longer identify with being Western.
The fact that we now increasingly identify with some subgroup, means many of us focus on improving the success of the subgroup with which we align. That means that growing your piece of the pie means growing the size of the pie of your subgroup over growing the size of the pie for the larger group (European, American, Western, etc.)
In China, on the other hand, the focus is on growing the size of the pie for China. It's going to be hard to compete with this unless we adopt the same mindset.
My impression is that that's a dividing line in many European countries. Some (mostly the elite) identifies as European and sees the single nations as backwards and vulgar, while others identify as their nationality and consider the EU as an elitist project to shift the power away from individual nations.
That's why although i'm more left-leaning, the constant focus of the left on subgroups being wronged is laughable and such a distraction from the reality of the world. China and their technological superiority and increasing economic sphere doesn't care.
Where you need good leadership is when you have heterogenous groups that lack coherent alignment and need to be brought together to establish consensus.
The fact that Democracy has had a really good run for the past 100 years is nowhere near a guarantee that Authoritarianism won't rise again for the next 100.
You can easily argue that the rise of Democracy in the 20th century is simply because the United States won world war 2 and the cold war, and all other countries adopted Democracy just to emulate the US.
If Germany had discovered the atomic bomb before the US (which arguably could have happened if history were just slightly, randomly different), the world could be radically different. We could all be arguing right now that Democracy is just too weak to survive.
I'm saying that before World War 2 you wouldn't generally consider Democracy to be the default paradigm for how nations were governed.
There were many other democracies, and pro-democracy movements that preceded WW2 and had nothing to do with the US.
Comparatively the People of the West are divided. Not just the US but also Europe. They are divided not just by politics, but also by their world view, and few have anything good to say about their home countries.
This right here is the biggest wedge China can exploit. If they move as one while the West gets mired in debates then China will win.
That’s out group homogeneity (or maybe just propaganda-driven thinking — Western media certainly portrays China that way) and not even remotely true to anyone who can read the Chinese language to some extent. Go to allegedly tightly controlled Weibo and check out comments under most sociopolitical news — I mean actual news, not “happy 71st birthday PRC” kind of stuff, and witness the shouting match between different groups, with an astonishing amount of “unpatriotic” opinions everywhere (astonishing if you think the Chinese should have one voice, that is). There are also a substantial group of people who quite literally worship developed countries — ironically more prevalent among people who have never set foot outside the country, I’d say — and will quickly label any domestic problem as uniquely Chinese, even when they’re not. There’s even a Chinese saying about this, “the moon is rounder in foreign lands” (everything is better in foreign countries). Even different group of patriots can be seen warring against each other sometimes over political issues.
People on the opposite side of the world aren’t nearly as different once you get to know them.
New supply chains are in fact underway, even before Trump's horseshit. There was a inkling of migrating manufacturing to India and its only been accelerated further.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-shifting-supply-chain-c...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/08/apple-airpods-being-built-in...
I'm tempted to say the process was accelerated in China, but then again the heyday of U.S. manufacturing was only 20-30 years, maybe 40-50 if you include 1920s appliances boom[1], as the shift to Japan was in full swing by the 1970s. China is at about the 30 year mark (1990-2020), so if we really wanted to take a long-term historical perspective none of the contemporary politics matters--industrialization dynamics are running their natural course and choosing our politicians based on how "tough" they are on China (regarding trade policy) is pointless.
[1] Though I don't know if the industry's share of the labor market was significant, the U.S. dominated the appliances industry in the 1920s, so much so that it significantly contributed to the Great Depression. Not only did it directly inflate investment markets, the unbalanced trade with Europe, exacerbated by the gold standard, caused monetary deflation in European economies, which contributed to labor problems (stagnant wages, increasing unemployment), which in turn ultimately crashed foreign demand for both American appliances and investments. At least that's what I remember from reading Lords of Finance.
I think China's superpower is concentrating supply chains and specialization on a scale and to an effect / competitive advantage that's only possible when drawing from a population of 1.4 billion who speak the same language and share the same infrastructure and regulatory frame. No one else is really going to replicate that. The idea that a loose assembly of countries like ASEAN separated by geography, language, laws is going to be more efficient than China... who still has 2X more people to draw from is a nonstarter. India possibly but unlikely.
I think the future is separate assembled in Vietnam and India lines to circumvent tariffs while China gets promoted to designer + manufacturer of advanced products. Though truthfully China can choke even assembled elsewhere prospects if she ever decides to weaponize sanctions like US does. While Chinese manufacturing labour concentrated in coastal regions is has gotten expensive, China is not short of cheap labour. There's about 600M rural people whose income range from Bangladesh to Vietnam in the interior provinces. If China _really_ wanted to, they could recapture all these markets, and there's some indications things might move that way as domestic policies focus on interior development.
China on the other hand is very much lead. I think the west constantly bringing up Chinese demographic and other issues is just the west being lazy and ignoring reality. China is becoming unstoppable.
Democratic nations banding together or building new supply chains are pipe dreams.