https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
Is there a reason to trust them if so, considering they would be coming from a brutal, authoritarian dictator?
The question is is the growth worth the pound of flesh the CCP takes as its right in return for that growth and social stability?
Another fair question is could it not have been achieved through a more humane system of governance?
A lot of the move towards authoritarianism that we’ve been seeing in the world has been driven by the success of the “China model”.
If India is successful to a similar degree as China, that shatters this belief, especially since there are very significant questions about the Chinese economy and how stable it is. A lot of the numbers appear to be made up in a way India simply cannot do.
And if Democracies can achieve success, Chinese citizens themselves may consider it as the better alternative as it might indicate that China’s economic success was less the result of the CCP and more because the Chinese government chose to move towards a Western capitalist economic system a couple of decades before India.
The CCP stance is that democracy wouldn’t work for China. Whether that’s actually true or not is debatable of course.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-politics-xi-idUSBRE...
The 2016 Indian banknote demonetisation is perfect example of how a somewhat democratic state can pull off large scale action that China refutes as a possibility. Was it pretty? Was it effective? Who knows. What matters in this argument is that it's the kind of corruption fighting mechanism that China likes to cite as the domain of their heavenly mandate and not possible for democracies.
Again, China can keep yelling that their way is the only way for China, but there does need to be a little more supporting basis than that.
Says who?
Running a society is hard. You can't simply compare the reality against a hypothetical better outcome that was guaranteed to happen under democracy, even ignoring the claim (at best contentious) that India has done better than China for the last couple decades.
An equally a propos comparison would be the Soviet Union and its attempt at a transition to democracy. Life spans and material wellbeing collapsed, and even their political system ultimately backslid, to something as bad as the USSR. You can say that they just did democracy wrong--which they certainly did--but that doesn't solve the core issue that getting democracy right is a really hard problem. If the CCP had committed to democratic reforms under Deng, maybe it would have worked out better; but it also might have created turmoil and mass death, as attempts at democracy did in the USSR. And if the latter happened, rubbernecking Westerners would just say "well China did democracy wrong"; democracy never fails, it can only be failed. It's easy to call for from afar, but when your society's well-being is on the line, it's a much scarier risk to take for abstract benefits.
Democracy is a common value of humanity and an ideal that has always been cherished by the Communist Party of China and the Chinese people.
India’s real middle class is just one financial disaster away from poverty. China on the other hand has been immensely successful at lifting millions out of poverty and securing them firmly in the middle class.
Also, if you think India cannot and does not make up numbers, you are completely wrong. See most recently their COVID numbers. See in the past their economic data that was treated at par with garbage by the global community.
We don't know what is the extent of the real estate bad loan crisis in China. But if the protests surrounding it are telling, then I would say that the Chinese middle class are already in a financial disaster. Couple that with the increasing anti-globalization from the West, and China's middle class certainly ends up being in a very bad position.
India’s middle class will fall into poverty if they lose their money. the critical difference is that the indian middle class is without government or societal support to help them out of poverty.
In India, around 3% of the population pays income tax because the rest are under the tax bracket. Yet somehow the government manages to have public schools and hospitals. During covid, when students and children in the UK were starving, India was feeding 200 million people out of the government's pockets.
Its funny seeing people who have the faintest idea of Indian ground realities make sweeping generalizations about a country of 1.5b people.
To use the same analogy is like someone hacked their system and placed a bug in production.
2) India has its own sordid history with coercive sterilization. During the Emergency, millions of people were sterilized, under varying levels of compulsion.
It is fascinating how they went from "One Child" to their current policy without admitting any mistake at all.
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As for India, not only have they had problems with forced sterilization, they've also had problems with parents wanting a son at any cost: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/dec/27/f...
It's ok to say "China was going the right direction between years X and Y" without being an "apologist".
* "China steals everything" (which essentially labels Chinese people as thieves).
* "Chinese scientists created CoVID-19 and then lied about it" (alleging that Chinese scientists have no integrity).
* "China only copies" (implying that Chinese people aren't creative).
* "Chinese numbers are all fake" (implying that millions of Chinese people are in on some conspiracy to fake everything).
In other words, in my experience, many people who say they just hate the CCP actually hold a huge number of negative stereotypes about Chinese people, and have a very conspiratorial view of the country.
One fact that everyone here should take into consideration is that the Communist Party has a very broad base of support in China, and is fairly popular. Most people actually approve of the central government, not in everything, but in general. If the Communist Party were as comically evil as people in the West tend to think, it wouldn't have this level of support, and it would lose power pretty quickly.
And one can't explain its popularity by claiming that Chinese people don't know what's going on - they tend to be far better informed about happenings in China than 99% of commenters in your average English-language internet forum. If you can't imagine why people in China would support the government, just consider the fundamental transformation that hundreds of millions of people have gone through in the last few decades. People who did not even have running hot water in their homes or reliable electricity are now wealthy enough to fly to Paris for a week.
I'm not trying to paint a rosy picture of the Chinese government or the Party, but I'm just pointing out that things are significantly more nuanced than most people here think.
This is an incredible claim, given that nobody has even alleged that China is killing anyone in Xinjiang.
I recall when "genocide" used to mean "murder of a race" (as both the history of the term and its etymology make clear). It's now being devalued by obviously hyperbolic, rhetorical use.
I didn't consider it "genocide" when the US killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Iraq. If that's not genocide, there's no way it's genocide when China carries out political indoctrination in Xinjiang.
Amazing that this needs to be said...
They also are responsible for stealing hundreds of billions of dollars of IP from the US every single year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_intellectual_pr...
And masters at stealing R&D and tech from US companies for their own use
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_spy_cases_in_t...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-hackers-took-trillions-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/17/chinese-h...
Best evidence of this is the previous 2020 elections.
Okay, if so, then why complain about Chinese spying? They are just doing what the US is even more guilty of.
As a westerner I would love to see the US stop embarrassing us in front of autocrats.
Source?
“If some random Russian not can trigger a coup”
It’s still an act of aggression regardless of whether the US is equipped to deal with it. While I agree that the US does lots of shitty things, we have way more checks and balances than our key enemies. For one, it is the people who elect those who represent us.
I think it would be naive to think similar programs are not being enacted in the present day.
He has openly been a an advocate for military action and regime change by the US in several countries[1]. Recently he also openly mentioned his role in helping plan coups d'etat in an interview, when asked about the events on January 6th that followed the 2020 election:
"As somebody who has helped plan coups d'etat— not here but you know (in) other places— it takes a lot of work." [2]
Also, tragically enough, he in fact served as the 25th United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Just a reminder, when listing its principles, the first point of the UN's foundational charter reads: "The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members."
The USA counting a self-proclaimed "coup planner" as their ambassador to the UN can give us an idea of how fundamental interfering (ie, "hacking") other nation's affairs is to their foreign policy, and how little it respects the sovereignty of nations.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bolton
> Source?
Not even hiding it: https://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.htm...
"Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens.
This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders." - George Carlin
But the coverage is probably outsized to their actual impact compared to the hundreds of billions spent by the local monopolies trying to influence the elections themselves.
Trump ignoring his personal issues for a moment, has shown with his rise and fall, just how much of the media are just working together - I have never seen all of them including interestingly enough CNBC and Fox constantly dismissing the same candidate in unison for months towards to 2016 election.
Add the tech monopolies into the mix for 2020 and it was another eye opener.
Not being daft, but what fall? Sure the non-Right media wants to paint him as a has-been, but that's revisionist history, and wishful thinking.
Key fact: Trump in losing received more votes than Obama in either of BO's victory. Yet Obama is generally painted as popular and love, and Trump a nothing?
I'm not a fan of DT but a false hope in a false narrative is an opportunity for him to exploit.
[0]https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...
> billions of dollars of IP
I like how your make claims about important societal issues, but the evidence provided is all about money.
For instance when we started getting problems with vaccination of people in Norway it was not due to China but fake news and conspiracies pushed by the radical conservative movement in the US.
The US holds a special position in advancing and protecting democracy, but is itself turning into a liability. China is a concern but first priority has to be to fix American democracy before it drags the whole West into the mud.
Authoritarian regimes are bad. The fact that this authoritarian regime has mongoloid/asiatic facial features is irrelevant. I hated GWB’s expansion of the security state and two senseless middle eastern wars, I hated Obama killing American citizens without trial, and I hated Trump’s… everything, basically, but admittedly withdrawing from Afghanistan was p cool. Stopped clocks etc.
Anyways it’s totally consistent with wanting a just world to also hate the largest authoritarian regime in that world. This “but what if it’s because you’re racist?!?!” line is an absurdity
But the bad guys are the chinese, who hasn't been involved in a war in 40 years.
Also, re: "without forced-sterilization" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-30040790
https://youtu.be/bLIsqYKDqY8?t=214
To put it another way - how many children are an acceptable sacrifice for mammon? I say "none".
We'll never know how much more advanced India would be if they invested as much in infrastructure.
You're comparing the total debt of China with the national debt of India.
All the mega banks in China are indistinguishable from the state - you're looking at 100% of debt to GDP on their balance sheets alone.
Such a bank does not exist in the US or any major EU countries. They issue bonds and keep the debts on their balance sheets.
I'm skeptical India has any such equivalent.
The same is true for all the major banks in China. The main difference in China is that - since the bank is an extension of the state - the state directly decides who does and very importantly WHO DOES NOT get funding.
The companies that do get funding are often times GSEs. This is federal debt... Pretending otherwise is pedantic.
Sure, I'm with you - count Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's debts as the US Federal Government's debt.
India and almost every other country don't have any equivalents.
PRC national debt gdp is ~70%, LOWER than India ~90%.
Also PRC has 5.5x the GDP / per capita vs India.
All the mega banks in China are indistinguishable from the state - you're looking at 100% of debt to GDP on their balance sheets alone.
Some countries progressing faster though, (China being one of them).
> Net Resource Transfers (NRT) for all developing countries have been mostly large and negative since the early 1980s, indicating sustained and significant outflows from the developing world (see graph below)
https://gfintegrity.org/press-release/new-report-on-unrecord...
just nation level apathy on child mortality in lower class citizens.
Today, GDP per capita in India is $2,200.
It is $12,500 in China.
I'm not sure that 'Six times faster growth, and eight years of life expectancy, and seven times fewer people facing hunger and food insecurity' is as much of a black eye as you think.
I could think of quite a few Americans who would happily embrace a one-party state, if it meant that they wouldn't lose five sixths of their wealth and income, and eight years of their life, and have a one-in-seven chance of having to seriously face starvation. Most of them, actually.
Chinese policies are meant to solve Chinese problems (whether they are successful is a different discussion). The government is in the business of producing results, ideology is secondary.
Also, it’s interestingly a huge black eye to the CCP: news of this Indian accomplishment will be censored in China, because it proves that nations can progress without forced-sterilization/-abortion/-1-child-policy/authoritarianism/ etc.