> Where could China have been today if it started opening up decades earlier?

Or without Mao being a trash fire of a leader. (Flip side: where would they be without Deng or Zemin, or others in the CCP who put nation above personal interest? The folks Xi is killing because they threaten his personal interests.)

Maybe the combination of capitalism + democracy is so successful because it aligns the incentives of leaders and the masses best (to the extent it is possible).

My takeaway from China is democracy is less important than political competition. Between Mao and Xi, the CCP had the latter without the former. Today, America has the former and is struggling to keep the latter.

Yes agreed. But competition for what?

I'd say for the good of the majority of the people.

In other systems only those on top profit (maybe 10-20% max) even if they claim otherwise.

Thus democracy, through competition, aligns the leader's incentive with their people best.

> In other systems only those on top profit

Are you saying the US isn't doing that presently?

Yes. Mind you that like most things in life, it's a spectrum.

I think not. European colonialism was hardly a democratic project, and the extreme success of the US is attributable less to ideology and more to being an entire continent with a relatively tiny indigenous population that had not exploited any of its natural resources. Ideological/paradigmatic competition is not some neat controlled experiment where you can normalize existing conditions to unity and then draw conclusions from measuring subsequent growth; initial resource distributions make a massive difference and geography, while not the only factor, is highly determinative.

So you’re saying having a head start due to geography is all that matters?

If power differences can be explained by better access to resource and it’s only about head starts, China should have stayed the leading power.

China had fallen behind long before Mao, after being among the most powerful and advanced nations for most of recorded history. It appears to now be stepping back into that familiar role.

Neither China or the West handled the transition to industrial civilization well. A key difference is that most Chinese died due to incompetence on the part of their leaders, but in the west they mostly murdered one another on purpose.

Once again a Nazi is in charge of the western world's most advanced rocket program.

doesn't "murdered one another on purpose" equals to "incompetence on the part of their leaders"?

Then US continues to be a hegemony