I know it is popular to tell oneself: "but China", so one can stop thinking about what we can do, but China as of 2023 has 3 times (!) the capacity of installed renewable energy than the US.
You can always find some metric where your side looks better and the other worse, the trick is not to let yourself use it to excuse your own bullshit unless you love to actively harm yourself.
This is such an important point. My family’s been in the Los Angeles area since the 1950s and I remember a semi-constant stream of whining from conservatives about California’s environmental laws, and that “someone else will just pollute more” excuse for inaction was a common refrain. This was always annoying because even if we assume that the global situation will get worse, it’s not just less bad than it would have been but also locally they reduced a massive number of deaths, illnesses, asthma cases, etc. not to mention the quality of life improvements from not getting headaches or having days where you can’t see across the street. Even if removing plastic straws or bags isn’t going to save the world, anyone who likes going to the water is going to appreciate not having all of that trash visible.
The other thing we always need to keep in mind is that we are living in huge, well-developed economies with millions of people. We can do many things at once and something like a ban on single-use plastic is not a huge time sink. We banned disposable plastic bags here, and despite all of the dire predictions it took less than a week to adjust.
While I concede that populations with livable-experience spanning millennia tends to drive Societies in that direction. I think it's more accepting a certain amount of tolerable corruption: China is incredibly corrupt, and will go to great lengths to window dress in order to appear to be either compliant or at least effectively operating within acceptable parameters. This is a common attribute of totalitarian regimes, wherein your proximity to power is what ultimately dictated the level of severity with which you will be punished, my first experience with this was with food: specifically that of organically grown food and came ot a head during the baby formula poisoning event which led to a black-market in HK. Then we saw this first hand how the CCP dealt with Bitcoin, and its continual 'banning' despite Bitmain being led not just by a Chinese national, and then a very member of the CCP itself, but even exchanges like Hubei thrived in this time and held on to a majority of the hash rate.
Long story short: Bitcoin is now banned but there are still a significant amount of miners in mainland despite all the theatrics.
There is nothing Anarchic about it, its blatant favoritism that coincides with all class based structures that congruently emerge within a State: despite all the rhetoric of equality within Socialist/Communist doctrine would lead you to believe it makes you wonder if this isn't EXACTLY what they all lead to. I'm sympathetic to the class inequality of Socialism, and even see the (often misinformed) tenets of Marxism tries to remedy and it's long-term aims but... it's theoretical and practical applications wildly differ from the former and the only result that remains constant is that lots of people end up dying in starvation, pointless wars and land/ecosystems are often destroyed for generations in the process: this came very apparent to me outside of ideological purview during my apprenticeship in horticulture in E. European countries that I visited and then once more when I was living near a hotspot of the collapse of Yugoslavia.
They were taking out mines and other un-exploded ordinance from what was my community's front yard less than a Km away from a park near a marina where mothers walked with strollers around Marina and Promenade and about ~2Km from my very home.
>Which is fascinating, cause as soon as party rule is threatened, that very same principle ceases to apply.
Fascinating isn't the term you want to use here, and I take it you have no one in Tibet, Xinjiang or Hong Kong, because of you did you would see this from an entirely different lens, and nothing is fascinating about it unless you enjoy pointless Human misery/death/subjugation.
It's almost like the application of Law is circumstantial and based on a litany of factors that create an insular ruling class that have no qualm with erasing History by force: even the norms of genocide (HK is mainly Han) ethno-cleansing (Xinjiang) fall apart but are not off the table in order for the CCP to cement it's rule at all costs in ways that actually matter.
The only real experiment of Anarchism that was remotely allowed to stand in China was Kowloon's walled city [0], and to no one's surprise the CCP has been doing everything to hide it's 'shame' and 'colonized' past ever since the uprising in 2019, forcing everyone out and bulldozing the area under 'renovation' and offering the HongKongers little to nothing in return in the process.
0: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/kowloon-walled-city
How is that different to other countries? In the UK, for example, the Tory party have been enacting laws to make it difficult to legally protest.
Not everyone is willing to shoot lead into a large gathering of people the less of them the better.
If you're lucky the judges will overturn the law and keep their jobs.
They steal our freedom and profits via taxes. Taxes in China are not even that high for european standard, but they do infringe more on their citizens liberty.
On the other side, western societies are doing more of that too, between covid, gdpr, and the incoming cyber resiliance act
What exactly do you mean? Kowloon Walled City has never been under de facto mainland Chinese control. De jure sovereignty was transferred to the United Kingdom in the early 1990s so that it could be demolished, so by the time Hong Kong was handed back to the Chinese, the walled city had no longer existed. So how can the evictions and the bulldozing, carried out by the British-controlled Hong Kong government in the early 1990s, be in any way related to the 2019 protests?
Though to be fair, the vast vast majority of HN comments regarding more complex topics are not coming from first hand sources, or those who've had serious discussions with people who've had that first hand experience.
Or you can just work for a large company.
The reason most large countries have standardized on democracy + separation of powers + rule of law (in various flavors) is precisely because it's a decent solution to this.
China's governance struggles are because it wants two contradictory things (a) absolute authority of the CCP + (b) absolute adherence to the rule of law.
Unfortunately, explicitly placing a political party made of humans above the rule of law is a recipe for ignoring the latter. First when it's politically inconvenient. Then, once it's become culturally acceptable, whenever anyone thinks they can get away with it.
Xi smartly pushed this back a few decades, to the extent possible, by identifying and pursuing corruption vigorously (from the top) as an existential threat to the CCP. Unfortunately, absolute power... etc. ... and inevitably aspects of those corruption crusades turned into removing political enemies from power.
Authoritarian regimes' greatest weaknesses are corruption and blindness to inconvenient truths.
Democracies' are lack of unity and long term planning.
This is true in China, but it's true everywhere else. It's true in the west. If people stop complying we would get way more power and overall reduce inequality between the few rich and powerful and politically connect and you everyday Joe.
For the same principle, Russia could never control Ukraine without support, the romans couldn't control their provinces without local approval.
I dont believe it
Inequality would be even worse and upward mobility would be reduced, at least in the west.
>If the people armed themselves and coordinated, they would outnumber policemen and soldiers.
It feels like chaos would emerge, no true leaderships, gangs, mafias everywhere
You're right that you can't have a Pharaoh without a huge society built around one, but you don't get that society without a professional force policing the farming of the Nile, and you don't get successful farming of the Nile without a police force strong enough to oppose resistance / enforce retribution on "cheaters" with regard to water redistribution.
Regarding revolutions: sometimes the govt realizes it has a cancer and takes steps to cut it out or irradiate it. Sometimes the cancer wins and the entire body dies. Out of the ashes typically rises...autocracy. You only get something else when the power brokers actively strive to make such a thing, and even then you still frequently end up with autocracy.
History. Go read it.
The same principle applies to colonialism. The British in India, the French in Indochina, and countless other examples from history: the imperial power always needs support from the locals, usually the elite or in some way privileged classes whose welfare becomes tied to the rule of the imperial power.
Edit: found one...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/23/china-factorie...