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I don’t have the knowledge or experience to refute much of this but do that consider China has not found some new, incredible system of economics. They’re massively tilting their economy and investment towards things like this to the detriment of their consumers and other sectors of the economy. It is an inefficient economy that needs strong reforms that will likely never happen. The main character argument seems like some self fulfilling prophecy you believe in. Whatever happens, I’d probably rather be in the shoes of the US than China in the next 50 years.
I don’t underestimate their ability to innovate but I don’t believe in their ability to produce strong thinkers and leaders that come from out of nowhere. There’s some appropriate panic about their progress in many areas, but I just don’t believe in ‘capitalism with socialist Chinese characteristics’. The idea that they will just steamroll the world is far fetched imo.
And precisely this mindset's why the US, yea West is decaying - instead of infinite striving for excellence, those raised here sit on past laurels and cope away anything better. Living without curiosity is comfortable lest you learn something new and convert everything around you into tech debt to work on - yet that comfort's disappeared, hence our entire community, formed around discussions of cost disease and cultural decline.
More glib, is America, are Americans really just better because of superior protestant-frontier culture - even though they lost their mandate and lack children to be replaced? What distinguishes Chinese in America from those in the PRC, home grown communists from foreign infiltrators, pedophiles from the heartland like Hastert and Foley from Afghan bachah-lovers and Pakistani groomers? REV Group closed factories and quintupled prices so an (inferior!) American firetruck costs a magnitude more than Chinese or even German vehicles, which our communities must pay for, our world is on fire, and you say nothing's wrong.
I don't understand your point here.
You're complaining about Americans being glib but your comment is one of the worst offenders I've seen in a while.
I think his point is that many Americans are watching China build an extremely impressive society almost from nothing and searching for excuses to explain Chinese achievement away rather than deciding they could learn a thing or two.
(It’s not ‘real’ growth, Chinese can only imitate, what about the consumer sector, etc.)
It is conceivable (though not certain) that the achievements of the West are not a reflection of a better philosophy or system of government but merely a temporary reflection of weakness in our competitors plus luck for us (finding a new continent, the renaissance, etc.). If so, if so, it would behoove us to get our act together and drop our certainty in our own systems ASAP.
Is anyone saying China isn't in some of ways impressive? But except for maybe industrial might it's still no comparison. For example, many Chinese people joke that the Chinese dream is "becoming American". It's an unpleasant place to live for all but a few. Much like the Soviets it's a poor totalitarian dictatorship forcing money into key sectors at an unsustainable rate to keep pace with America. I'm not implying it will totally collapse like the Soviets by the way, but acting like a country with a $13k GDP per capita is a true peer to America in most ways is on its face pretty tough to swallow.
I have only ever visited China once but most of the people I spoke to (and the Chinese I have known outside China) were very proud of their country and not very interested in America.
This is the point being made above about glibness. China is rapidly developing industrial might, while America (plus Europe) looks an awful lot like a sclerotic mess with incredibly high costs, propped up by finance and an AI bubble. And faced with this, Americans claim that ‘actually, the Chinese want to be like us really’ and ‘Chinese growth is all an illusion so it’s not worth worrying about’*. Americans seem right now to be incapable of genuinely entertaining the proposition that the American way of doing things isn’t the only way or the best way.
*The latter claim may be true. Genuinely unsure.
Whereas one might as easily point out that huge amounts of Western economic activity are either self-sabotaging (wasting vast amounts of treasure and brainpower on finely-balanced legal questions, financialisation of the real economy) or fripperies and super stimuli (witness China heavily restricting video games).
Ultimately people didn’t want to be American or like Americans because of America’s culture and system of government, but because America was rich and powerful and they wanted to be rich and powerful too. Even for Americans themselves this is the case, I think: how many Americans would happily live in a third-world shithole economy as long as it was run faithfully in accordance with the American Constitution and Amendments? 10%? If America loses industrial might, they will lose a lot of other things in quick succession.
This is the same mistake we British made, incidentally: that the rest of the world looked up to us and came to be educated by us and copied our parliament because they liked us and respected our way of life. No. They respected Empire and when the Empire died so too did the respect.
I have spent a lot of time in China and more time with chinese expats in Asia and America. There is a subset of people who are absurdly pro-CCP, mostly party insiders and a subset of highly educated/succesful ultra-nationalists. These are the only people you will probably meet if you don't speak Chinese or another Asian language. Young people at large are very unhappy with the current state of corruption, know the wages there are awful, and furthermore know the youth unemployment rate is awful and rising. Of course, my sample set (so to speak) will be biased, (particularly the expat community in asia) but it's not a secret that the Chinese youth are being screwed over by the CCP intentionally depressing wages and an additional issue of huge unemployment. There is no more "the future looks brighter than yesterday" feeling in China now. Quite the opposite.
And when I say "The Chinese dream is to become American." I say it because it is actually a phrase thrown around many circles in (at least South) China. I didn't create it myself.
This seems like a huge strawman to me. Americans aren't capable of ciriticizing themselves? Really? I mean, go just about anywhere and all Americans do is complain about America to the point of parody. Hell, if you want me to give you a list of my complaints about America I will gladly list them here, but they just won't be that America is poor with a government funneling people's money into a tech race that it's not fit to compete in. You have some fair points about the sclerotic bureacracy, but undoubtedly it's much more complicated than the popular meme of "China just gets things done and America/the West doesn't".
I would say 150+ years of mass immigration before American total hegemonic power suggests that people wanted to be Americans long before America was the all powerful hegemon it is now. However, I will admit a lot of that shine has worn off since America has become more and more like a European bureacracy laden all encompassing state. America is not as much the land of the free as it was, even if it's doing better than any other developed country I can think of.
EDIT: Let's also note that right now China is very poweful and nobody wants to become Chinese. Even me, somone who has an obsession with Asian culture and languages, who finds Chinese history very interesting, and loves parts of its (former) civilization would admit this.
But there is also a truth that people want to emulate winners, not losers. Britain and Europe at large are on large losing streaks to say the least.
All points taken.
FWIW what I’m basing my ‘Chinese’ reports on is:
a) various conversations with (mostly older) people in train stations etc. Maybe I am the victim of a sophisticated propaganda barrage designed to subvert visiting foreigners but if it can successfully hire/imitate retired professors of geology then it’s a very good program. I didn’t speak to younger people.
b) My Chinese co-workers in Japan. One of whom is a very good friend and left China to escape his overbearing extended family not Xi. He is mildly pro-China rather than anti-China or pro-America, but not to any silly extent.
Of course Americans are capable of criticising themselves. But in the main they seem to criticise themselves for not being American enough. For failing to live up to the American ideal, undermining American freedoms/rights, too much or too little immigration according to taste. Very few people apart from the largely-defunct pro-European movement are saying that maybe the American way of doing things is at best one system among many. Or for example things like, “maybe balance-of-power democracy and a system of rights defended by law is less effective than a single party run by engineers and a tightly controlled industrial policy” or “maybe basing our national mythology on having a revolution to avoid paying taxes and submitting to central authority encourages fractiousness and sectarianism”.
EDIT:
You do have to bear in mind who these people were, though. Overwhelmingly Irish, Italian, German and Jewish, with some Chinese. All people who had pretty good reasons (poverty or persecution or not wanting to live with the Prussians) for leaving their current country. I am sure they liked the idea of freedom but I think that the push factors were more pressing. And indeed Britain also got many of these people.
I would say a professor is exactly the kind of person who is usually vehemently pro CCP. Reliant on the state, succesful, obliged by his profession to be pro-communist, and so on. Using him as an example of Chinese opinion is kind of like saying "Well most Americans love leftist ideology, I talked to an HR manager from Microsoft and she said it's beloved by all her coworkers."
Now, maybe I went too far because there are still plenty of strains of people who love the CCP, but I do think, especially compared to ten to fiteen years ago there is a gloom about the future of China among the Chinese. Not only is the economy puttering along haphazardly, but people, especially educated people who don't have a stake in pretending the CCP is great, are aware that Xi broke the chain of succession and limited separations of powers the CCP had built for itself post Mao and that is deeply related to the problems China is facing at the moment.
I mean, that's not really true as evidenced by Catholic integralist Fuentes's rise, (the know nothings were right and letting all the Catholics in was a mistake). However, I just don't think any well reasoned person who has spent time in China can honestly say that a separation of power individual right defending republic is more worth living in or succesful than a single party totalitarian communist state. If you want to say living in Germany is better than living in America, I might snigger at you a little behind your back, but I'll hear you out. But the country with a 13k GDP per capita running a genocide in its far reaches with a straight line of succession back to the most disastrous dictator in human history? I mean...I'm trying to be nice here...but it's hard... It's one thing to say "America should have more industrial policy." (which is a discussion being had) and completely another to say "The American republic is worse in most or many ways than the CCP."
The largest ethnic makeup of America is by far German and British (including Scottish and English as one for simpliticty's sake), with Mexicans a recent distant third. Neither of these places were exactly the bottom of the barrel of the world at the time. America was just better. I also think fleeing persecution (EDIT: I should say restrictiveness instead of persecution (in a broad sense, not necessarily genocidal or even violent)) was and to a large extent still is a gravity pulling a lot of the world towards America. That's kind of what the sales pitch of joining a free country entails--freedom.
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