I'm not disagreeing - I think it's important to see China as the undemocratic, illiberal, authoritarian regime that it is. And it is foolish to think that China is interested in a rule-based world order because they believe in the same values many key post-war figures in Europe and the US believed in.

It's that China's economy is heavily dependent on exports - and dependability and the appearance of stability is generally good for trade. Obviously, this is helped by political stability, which means less scope for the kind of outward-facing destructive populisms we see in the US or parts of Europe. But with China's economy in trouble, that might very well change.

China has a tendency to self-destruct every 300-400 years. The interesting thing is that many regions of the globe have a tendency to self-destruct every 300-400 years. Europe had major continent-wide cataclysms with WW1/2 in the 1900s; the Wars of Religion in the early 1600s; and the Hundred Years War + Black Death + Mongol Conquests in the 1300s. The Holy Roman Empire lasted from about 900 AD to around 1300 AD. The Roman Republic lasted about 500 years; the Roman Empire lasted another 400-500.

I think the logic might be that China just had their civilization-ending cataclysm, and so they're on the upswing now. Ditto Europe. This is probably not the end of the United States either, more like the Crisis of the 3rd Century. But it's just as logical to look back on the 400-year cycle and think "Better invest in the countries that have already had their crisis and dealt with it than ones that are starting to decay internally" than to look back on the last 75 years and think "Wow, that was chaotic, the next 75 years will be equally chaotic."

> The last 75 years or so in China... well amoung other things they killed over 50 million of their own people with a man made famine.

Such an event is also one reason India got my grandparent's generation to leave.

And the one about 175 years ago in Ireland probably contributed to both the (eventual) Irish home rule movement and the writing of the Communist Manifesto.

While the Great Leap Forward's famine was avoidable in theory, I think that the historical examples of so many others having similar experiences during the transition from agrarian to industrial, shows that in practice the mistakes are very easy to fall into.

> they killed over 50 million of their own people with a man made famine

... and they learned nothing from it.

I sincerely doubt much is left of those self-correcting mechanism in the US. They are being deconstructed at high pace currently, and not even in secret, and apart from a delay by a judge here and there, it's crickets.

We will see what man made disasters the current (and future) US adminstration will cause. By every measure it looks like they are determined to find out the hard way.

50 million ?

according to someone's research[1]:

here are some civilian deaths within china:

- land reform killed 1-4.7 million

- campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries killed 712k-2mm

- three-anti and five-anti campaigns killed at least 100k

- sufan movement killed ~53k

- anti-rightist campaign killed 550k-2mm

- '59 tibetan uprising killed 87k

- violence in the great chinese famine killed 2.5mm

- socialist education movement killed 77k

- guanxi massacre killed 100-150k

- inner mongolia incident killed 15-100k

- yangjiang massacre killed 3.5k

- daoxian massacre killed 9k

- ruijin massacre killed 1k

- zhao jianmin spy case killed 17k

- shadian incident killed 1.6k

- tiananmen square protests & massacre killed 200-10k

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42456077

> violence in the great chinese famine killed 2.5mm

> they killed over 50 million of their own people with a man made famine

so it's 52.5mm!

that's huge!