> Show me a place that looks like that where no-one goes hungry, has to worry about medical bills and doesn’t live in fear of the rich and powerful and then I’ll be impressed.

You are just describing every western European country.

Every Western European country now. Not in the time those sights were built.

No true Scotland.

No, that was the exact point I was making: plenty of places have impressive stuff dating from the days of massive inequality/injustice, we just don’t produce it anymore. Pointing at a 300 year old building isn’t a gotcha, it was literally just the point I was making in the first place.

I mean, my family and i just spent 5 weeks over Christmas in Rome, Paris and London.

I live in Toronto where we have our share of homelessness and those 3 cities put Toronto to shame with the amount of poverty and homelessness we saw.

Europe is beautiful and does many things better than North America and Asia but hunger and poverty are area's where its just as bad if not worse.

That’s something that’s developed over the last couple decades. Europe didn’t have vast amounts of homelessness and poverty. My guess is Schengen plus lax immigration policies. That is compare requirements for entering the UAE vs Europe. Europe is less selective.

Try wealth inequality. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, at some point poor becomes homeless.

You’re importing millions which puts pressure on housing and employment where they compete against locals depressing wages. Additionally many from Eastern Europe, Middle East, Central Asia and Africa are semi skilled and unskilled who in turn either can’t land a job or don’t earn enough.

Exactly! In Europe, people that are leaving in the streets are mostly illegal immigrants, drug addicted or people that refuse helps for mental issues or culture (gipsies).

That’s guaranteed not to be true but you are free to believe that if it makes you feel better.

Really? So why are there food banks in the UK? Why does Google search remove links to personal details of multiple politicians in multiple European countries? For someone poor the top end of NHS dental treatment is a worry - even assuming they can find a dentist willing to take on NHS patients in the first place.

I could go on, but there are plenty of flaws in western Europe

the UK is a special case, not comparable to most of Europe. I work all over Europe(300+ travel days a year) and the UK is the only country I see young homeless men everywhere on the streets.

I think it’s a misread to attribute large-scale construction mainly to inequality. While inequality funded grand projects historically, today it’s effective planning, strong state capacity, and streamlined execution that make the real difference.

China’s development is impressive because it prioritizes coordination and scale, whereas Europe struggles more with political and organizational fragmentation and lack of initiative.

The strong state capacity collects the resources of large areas and concentrates them into large-scale construction projects in a handful of places. China has a small number of megacities with large, wealthy, modern urban cores and a very large population that lives somewhere else. There are about a hundred cities with more than a million inhabitants but only 47 have urban rail transit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_rail_transit_in_China That's inequality.

That's fair, but the number of cities with urban rail transit is increasing over time. Whether it's the smaller cities paying for the bigger ones... I don't feel like that's the whole picture, but I don't know enough to dispute that.

A first-order evaluation, just looking at yearly income per person, would say that urban centers make more money per capita and thus contributes more money per capita to tax than non-urban centers.

(Maybe I’m reading too much of a narrative into what you wrote, but–) I don’t think it’s causal like that; it doesn’t have to be. In particular, “wealthy, modern urban cores” tend to be self-sustaining economic force multipliers rather than parasitic resource sinks or vanity projects. Each specific megaproject might be one of the latter, of course. In general, however, I’d be careful about mixing up different public choice failures. How easy it is to: (agree on a fair way to) collect public money, identify and agree on some kind of public benefit, allocate resources to further that interest, execute projects without snags – etc.

Knowing how China designates cities[0], citation needed on the number of cities.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chongqing > The municipality covers a large geographical area roughly the size of Austria,[14] which includes several disjunct urban areas in addition to Chongqing proper.

On this list of Chinese cities by population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop... #100 is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiujiang with a total population of 4.6 million, of which 2.8 million live in urban areas and 1.1 million in the metropolitan area, i.e. the fact that cities often administratively subsume neighboring towns is already taken into account.

> Show me a place that looks like that where no-one goes hungry, has to worry about medical bills and doesn’t live in fear of the rich and powerful and then I’ll be impressed.

I think you’re still speaking about Chongqing. China builds these and closes the wage gap.

Oh come on.

Lower socio economic Chinese definitely still fear the rich and worry about being homeless and not getting medical treatment.

Tell me one way that your statement doesn’t apply to the US or many other wealthy developed nations.

The GINI coefficient is higher in the USA than it is in China.

China in recent years has reduced inequality while the US has done absolutely nothing to curb discontent, the same discontent that has led to the election of a fascist leader.

Don’t believe me, look up the data.

> China in recent years has reduced inequality

After many years of increasing inequality

> the US has done absolutely nothing to curb discontent, the same discontent that has led to the election of a fascist leader.

I cannot imagine possible definition of "fascist" that would include the US and exclude China. China has far more fascist features than any other major country - personality cult, courts compliant with the government, erasure of minority cultures - and actual genocide.

It seems some people have claimed the word fascist to mean something entirely different to what it actually means in an attempt to shut down conversations when things aren't going their way.

> China has far more fascist features than any other major country - personality cult, courts compliant with the government, erasure of minority cultures - and actual genocide.

These are unsubstantiated allegations that come directly from the governments you are loyally defending.

They are definitely substantiated when it comes to USA: Trump has a legendary personality cult and recently released trading cards for it. Trump's FBI just arrested a judge for noncompliance. Trump is hosting genocidal mass-murderer Ben-Gvir in the country right now. This is all just this week! Spare us the vague "look over there, China bad" hand-waving.

I didn’t say China wasn’t fascist, I only said that the US is moving in that direction rapidly. I am talking about trends not necessarily the state of things at this moment.

you don't even know what fascists means, in fact given an hour, and the internet, you still can't know what it means. protip: it doesn't mean shutting down gov agencies, reducing regulations and giving tax cuts. you are infected.

It is an insight into human irrationality to see a country where hundreds of millions have been lifted out of crushing absolute poverty, that has built one of the world's best infrastructure from nothing...in the 70s, China was poorer than every country in Africa bar one.

...the problem is that some people are concerned only with how things are done, this is feudal government, this is pre-industrial economic growth, who does things, how they do it, make sure nothing new is every tried because that is dangerous and might lead to the elite losing control. China (and much of East Asia) succeeded because they are concerned only with outcomes, and this is all that people care about anyway. Unfortunately, the West is now controlled by people who see change as dangerous, and nothing is more dangerous than a country leapfrogging them in development because it proves that their leadership is bankrupt and incompetent.

Western societies are blinded by the narrative their governments have fed them in the last 50 years: China Bad.

But us in 3rd world countries have the ability to see both Western and Eastern societies' development and compare it ij a more unbiased way.

Frankly the China bet looks more successful.

I don’t think anyone who understands geopolitics can agree with this take.

China has been able to (for a time) sustain this kind of rapid industrialization because of globalization, a model of hyper-inflation and by taking advantage of wage inequality (i.e. paying their workers less) in order to dump goods into other countries’ markets. Take away globalization and China starves in the dark, because the part of their population that is largest, most productive and knows how to even feed itself (China is a heavy net importer of food, especially pork) is also very old. And when those people are too old to work, China is going to rely on the rest of the world to sustain its (rapidly declining) population.

There are a lot of other Asian countries in a similar situation, but China is unique in how bleak the future could be for hundreds of millions of people.

A year ago I would have said “who knows when the scale will tip?” With what’s going on lately it seems that it may have already happened. Whether you agree with the economic policy of this administration or not, the ramifications are astounding. The US is positioned to come out of this the best, at the expense of the rest of the world. This is why China is all of a sudden calling the US bullies. They would never admit weakness, but they are suddenly feeling the heat. If the US took it a step further and decided to stop securing the seas in that part of the world, all hell would break loose.

For instance, do you think Japan and China would just “play nice” with no incentive to? I’m not so sure, and China has no access to the ocean without going through Japan.

This argument is Peter Zeihan's thesis too, and I'm not sure it'll be what actually comes to pass.

China still has an enormous population, and if they convert their society from production to domestic consumption and ride the value-add wave, they'll follow the American growth equation. And with more people to bolster that economy, to boot. You can already see this in their dominance of electronics, drones, EVs, and green tech. They're doing advanced, bleeding edge work in all of the industries that matter.

BYD, DJI, Eufy/Anker (vs iRobot), Lenovo, Alibaba, ... China is a formidable powerhouse in advanced products and value-add. These companies absolutely rival the best of what America and the West have to offer. And if your argument is one of demographics, these companies are staffed with young educated workers from a huge and healthy pipeline of STEM grads.

I think of all the predictions about the future of China - from the incredibly bearish ones like Zeihan's "death of China", to the bullish ones that declare this the "Chinese century" - I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

I don't see how China doesn't become a larger version of Japan or Germany or the US. Despite some demographic and economic headwinds, they've got an incredible head start.

If America aims to compete and remain in the top, it needs to stop doing things that look like Brexit that lead to degrowth and isolation. China isn't magically going to get weaker and provide free opportunity to the United States. On the contrary, it's fantastic peer-level competition that the US should use as motivation to work harder.

China is an incredible growth and innovation story, and a bar that all countries should hold themselves to. It's no time to slouch. Competition fosters the best innovation anyway.

Hyperinflation? They have been exporting deflation. Wage inequality? It is a productivity inequality, relative to the US. The idea that everyone should just be paid the same wage is quite an odd inference when you start the comment with explaining how everyone else just doesn't understand the things you do.

China moved away from the export-led model of growth about ten years ago (the largest exporter of deflation today is Germany and has been for a number of years).

China does have too many people...there is nothing they can do about that and that will limit their living standards for a long time.

China's future is only bleak if you are unaware of their history. They were poorer than every country in Africa bar one a few decades ago, what they have done is still regarded as impossible even after they did it. It is like winning the lottery and then grousing because there is someone else richer than you (which, btw, most people probably would do).

China does not trade with the US intensively anymore. The US doesn't really make anything that anyone needs, and is a big export market but not at the margin anymore...total exports to the US are 3% of GDP. Their economy has been rebalancing for decades (again, proof that their leaders are just smarter...Trump is flailing around in the darkness with tariffs rather than actually being able to design good policy, China started this ten years ago and almost done already, it would make more sense to target the EU).

China has a long coastline, their primary products mainly come through the Malacca strait...again, it is hard to take someone seriously who starts talking about their expertise in geopolitics but doesn't know which trade routes China actually uses.

Are you willing to submit to my one party state and be ok with being disappeared if you have an unpopular opinion or being enslaved if you are the wrong minority?

That isn't the neg that a lot of people think it is. You can keep saying this until you're blue in the face. It doesn't stop China's growth in power and scale. It doesn't impact their citizens at all. It's cheerleading with hot air and ignores the real work that the West needs to put in to effectively compete or counter.

The things the West can do to compete are to work harder on education, become an attractive destination for immigration, foster productive innovation, and focus on key industries and supply chains. Right now the US in particular is doing the opposite, and it's damaging America's standing and ability to compete with China.

China should be incentive to work harder. During the Cold War we used the threat of the Soviets being better than us to do some of the best engineering and science we've ever done. If our response to China is to call them names and hope that their growth stalls, then I think I can predict a different outcome for the West in the coming century.

Look I get it’s a little early to really draw that line in the US, but we were in a hell of a lot better position to have this argument a couple months ago.

If I told you that a government would exist in Africa that would eliminate poverty across most of the continent in three decades, would you think it strange if people thought this was a terrible thing?

I know many people in third world countries who fear China. I did when living in one (and continue to do so as a citizen of one with still close connections to it).

China is a success for whom? Exploited factory workers, Tibetans and Uyghurs?

For the hundreds of millions of people who have incomes more than $1 per day now. Simple.

China produced one of the greatest economic miracles ever seen in an age when every economic authority said that miracles were impossible. This is still the legacy today where people argue, even after China has thrown up cities housing 20m people in two decades, that isn't real...because it fundamentally overturns basic aspects of the pre-China account of economic growth (which was itself largely based on lies to create support for politicians).

Never forget that economic growth is dangerous to vested interests.

This is nonsense, ~zero rich people in third world send their kids to study in Shanghai instead of Boston or immigrate to Beijing instead of NYC to park their capital.

In fact it’s the rich Chinese who continue to move to Vancouver and London and Irvine to escape China and have a better future.

that is provably false. there are many african students in china. and they all must have some amount of wealth from home to afford that, at least compared to the local average which is a lot lower than in the west.

The old-guard rich people don't, that much is true. But the middle classes sure as hell are.

There's the fact that Chinese companies are basically hoovering up all the talent. In Latin America, Huawei alone eats up entire graduating classes of engineers. Pretty much every 'industry' event in any sector is nearly 100% Chinese. University staff are increasingly forming themselves via Chinese companies, and are thus transmitting that to their students. Chinese scholarships are popping up like mushrooms. Again, Huawei alone has provided more of them in the past year than the US Embassy has done in the past three decades.

People still dream about going to the US, sure. But MAGA is doing their damned best to whittle that lead away.

I mean, people go hungry today in plenty of places that fail to build (the U.K. for example) and they went hungry or lived in fear of the powerful in plenty of places before they were able to build at impressive scales.

I’m not sure if it’s what you are thinking of, but I don’t think the massive expansion of cities in the Industrial Revolution was caused by incredible inequality (unless you count inequality between urban and rural areas?).

I guess you could be thinking of ‘monuments’ built by the rich and saying they are due to inequality but I would think the analogue to Chongqing would be the constructing of the ‘megacities’ of the past, which is mostly about building lots of residential, industrial, and office space rather than palaces.

it's a social experiment. "if we don't do it top-down, will the educated and driven try to make us do better or do it themselves?". the answer revealed itself when architecture and design remained procedural but failed to emphasize and to build around the goal of social evolution and identity seeking. instead we got Gentrification, efficiency nobody asked for and wealth wasted on uninspired and demotivating pseudo-game theorists.

it's funny how nobody noticed in time that the side effects of these many experiments destroyed more beauty & opportunities, especially in urban convolution and social convection than they have revealed in data about human nature and civilized networks ... "we happened to become a community and build around the growing desires of our children and our own" is something you only hear on garden plots, even though on the country side everywhere, people are now third and fourth generation heirs.

“‘we happened to become a community and build around the growing desires of our children and our own’ is something you only hear on garden plots, even though on the country side everywhere, people are now third and fourth generation heirs.”

Meanwhile, in the US, small towns across the country are greying and dying out as wealth and opportunity are increasingly concentrated in urban areas.

I don't understand what this means, or how it fits with the comment it's replying to.