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At the very least, this is not an indisputable fact. I've known various Chinese in and out of the country and I've visited briefly; China had much tighter security and much more overt control of information than America, but it was, basically, just another country. The people clearly didn't consider themselves to be living in a dystopia. Nor were they smiling and desperately terrified like somebody in North Korea.
Meanwhile @No_one is literally arguing that America should keep any potential competitors 'in eternal poverty and civil war'. That strikes me as pretty shitty! Like, probably America is still the country that most of us would prefer to win a battle of superpowers if it absolutely must come to that, but that calculus changes very quickly if America starts throwing its weight around even more than it already does.
I'm not arguing that it should do so, or that it'd have been the right thing to do, I'm saying that had they been serious about preserving 'freedom in the future lightcone' or however e/acc guys who are anti-China put it, they'd have had to do that.
If CPC preserves its current ways of picking elites which is go to Chinese MIT/Harvard etc, pick psychologically most promising students who have already been established are 99.8th percentile and put them on the party career track - it's probably going to end up as the least stupid form of governance ever devised.
Then I apologise for misreading you. I come across the real article every so often and it irks me.
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I’m not sure. I like America as a country, and it wouldn’t be bad if they win the war of civilization if it happens, but im also very impressed with what the Chinese have built in their own country and the competence of their leaders. They’re pragmatic to say the least, value stability both at home and abroad, they make decisions based on fact rather than feelings, and the society itself is pretty balanced and sane. A Chinese century would be boring but probably fairly stable and prosperous.
This is very weird to me because this is heavily colored by recency bias. China looks like this because this is intentional. Their realpolitik and pragmatism is born out of fire, revolution, infighting over the levers of power and millions dead.
The reasons people like to hold up for China's success - their uniparty, the absolute dominance of the governing power, their zero-tolerance model of governance, their model of state and local governments, their high-IQ population - are also reasons to doubt them.
China has unique strengths, but also unique weaknesses. The Party is bloated, corrupt, inefficient, and bloodless transitions of power are not guaranteed. Local governance lies, schmoozes, and fakes numbers to look good to state governance. Measures are targets. Their state capacity leaves other states green with envy. But for all the bemoaning that You Can Just Do Things, or that the Chinese Government Can Just Do Things, the corollary is that the Government Can Just Do Things to You.
They're facing some genuinely difficult problems now; real estate collapse, the income trap, historical weakness in domestic consumption, demographic issues with tax base + aging population. It's too early to call the Chinese century. But broad policy strokes can affect billions.
The best way to understand this is that in China, the trains will not stop for you, even if you get caught in the doors. It'll drag you for miles, uncaring of if you become a corpse or not. And you have little control over where the train is going. It may lead to a prosperous, stable future, but if it doesn't and the train is headed for a cliff, what control could you possibly have over it, short of killing your way to the front?
Tell me again where did the European citizen have a choice of opting out of green energy lunacy or immigration ? What choices do you have in the supposedly most free system out there?
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