Wealth is a headwind against bad policy. Rich nations can survive many, many bad policies simply because they are rich. The policies it takes to get rich, stay rich, and continue to grow into the future all vary, and the transition is difficult to manage.

I think the relevant question is: are China's current policies pushing the country in the right direction? I don't see how they are.

Jack Ma shows how dangerous it is to be truly successful, so the next generation will at best be more conservative in what they pursue, and at worst won't even try. Given Western money won't be investing any more - the ability to realise capital gains is growing more difficult - and the CCP steals the wealth of potential investors, not being able to pursue big bests is probably inevitable anyway.

China has AWFUL demographics that are getting worse - their population is projected to be 650M by 2100 - and worse it is aging fast, with > 50% post retirement age in the next decade to 3.

On top of that, the CCP has re-emerged as the only force in China. CCP officials see stealing the wealth of other's as their right - a twist on the old joke to "the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's fortunes to steal".

Minimal foreign investment, killing internal investment by stealing the wealth of anyone rich, rising wages, awful demographics and a polity determined to remain isolationist (with few to any friends) and knock down the high achievers sounds like a recipe for imminent (in the decades sense) collapse to me. Not to levels of Sub-Saharan Africa, but even just with their population decline, China's GDP is going to fall in absolute terms, even if their GDP PPP per capita can be improved.

The scary thing is a Nuclear China in decline is likely to become increasingly erratic. Hopefully, the war in Ukraine gave China some pause, but having gone from starvation to world's largest economy in a generation, I'm not sure China is equipped for stagnation, let alone decline. I feel bad rooting for a likely vicious and brutal CCP internal crackdown over invasions of their neighbours, but that seems to me the lesser of two possible evils.

There's a conceptual gap that can and should be opened up. "Successful", even "fantastically successful" doesn't mean that you get to start throwing your weight around the state and social order.

It's fundamentally about being bound by the same rules and expectations as everyone else. He shouldn't be able to use his wealth and connections to try to steer the course of the state, or buy his way out of a situation he doesn't like. That sounds pretty damn wholesome and egalitarian to me.

Personally, I have a fair bit of faith in their government, because they have the economic and political levers to rapidly pivot to where the Next Big Thing is. Look at their dominance in solar manufacturing. You can argue it's low value, not innovative, whatever, but they certainly found a way to take over a significant industry that has global impact. Could the West even supply their demand without China's current market share?

I have to wonder if being a single-party state also helps keep their political discourse sane. There's no need to pander to an extremist base to make a candidacy viable, and there's the chance to say what needs to be said without risk of electoral backlash.

In 1960, something like 30 million people starved.

GDP up until the 80's was like that of a small US state.

The evaluation of Mao's legacy seems somewhat emotional, short-sighted and ahistorical given that modern state formation, for example in Europe, was almost always preceded by catastrophic violence.

And of course the rise of China in the following decades invalidates the claim that China 'declined terminally', unless we're literally inverting the meaning of the word 'terminal'.

Sorry for getting emotional about 30 million people killed by by a brutal, dictatorial government.

Thanks for putting it in perspective! /s

No different than our perspective on Napoleon. Incredibly brutal, brought war to Europe, but also implemented the civic code, arguably the most influential legal document in history.

By your logic the 6 million killed in the Holocaust shouldn't be such a big deal either.

Mao despite his failures is the foundational figure of modern China. He's not Hitler, who brought ruin not just to the Jewish population but to Germany as well. Mao still matters in China, Hitler doesn't in Germany. It's historically impoverished to grasp for Hitler analogies and having a reflexive panic attack every time Mao is up for discussion. Same with Stalin. Both still have significant influence in Russia and China, among the people as well as leaders and understanding why that is makes some sense.

Earlier you said "The Qing conquest killed 30 million, so did the Taiping Rebellion. 40 million died during the Three Kingdom wars, in 200 AD! About half the population at the time."

I'm not sure how one could interpret that as anything other "no big deal Mao killed a lot of people, lots of people have died in other empires".

And you're somehow conflating their legacy with the death toll. Those are separate things. Mao's brutal rule can be condemned while at the same time acknowledging his influence on China today.

And I would argue that Hitler had a massive influence on what Germany is today. Look at its role in the EU and its policy towards other countries and conflicts.

Am I reading this correctly? As in to have the modern Europe, you'd have needed WW2?

Same is true for America really. The country transformed twice, once through civil war and then into a superpower with a modern state during World War II. Military competition and war both internal and external are by far the strongest drivers of modernization.

Interestingly if you check wikipedia it appears that China had major famines every decade or up until that particular one, and nothing since then.

...And they would have been right until the 1980s. "If only Taiwan were unified with the mainland in the 1950s, they also could have experienced the horrors of the cultural revolution" is not great marketing for reunification.

Western comments on the Cultural Revolution is one-sided and myopic. The Great Famine was a failure to recover. It was also the last famine: famines were a regularly occurring event even before PRC. And Taiwan also wasn't a great place back then.

The USA was actually on China's side about supporting Pol Pot, with Vietnam against. Things are definitely blurred in history.