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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.
Without doxxing yourself, can you tell us when and where you were in China/East Asia? I feel this is one of the most important pieces of information when discussing the country. China in 2025, 2015, and 2005 are completely different places, and people’s views on the current state of the country, the outside world, and their own upward mobility differ dramatically. Without that context I find the discussion largely moot. I probably fit your description of the “well-educated, ultranationalist Chinese you find outside China”, although I’d describe myself as overeducated and only mildly nationalist. My social circle is obviously not representative of China as a whole, but at least within this overeducated slice of society, opinions about the Chinese state and future life prospects have changed substantially over the past two decades. During my childhood, among adults (and by osmosis among kids), there was a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction especially around corruption. As a kid, I remember adults constantly talking about “塞钱” (stuffing money) into police officers pockets to change a child’s name, birthday, etc. Corruption was absolutely rampant then. Ten years later to around 2015, when I was in university, tthe general sentiment at least in big cities had shifted a lot. There was a sense that the wind had changed, and unless you were very rich or very well connected, you couldn’t and shouldn’t expect things to work the old way. Gifting doctors money probably will get you a bed by the window but wouldn’t get you better treatment, police wouldn’t take bribes to change your kid’s name. Of course this wasn’t uniform across the country, corruption remained more prevalent in smaller cities, but the change was real. Other things like copy right also changed quite a bit. Gone were the days where I can find pirated movies on bilibili with a simple search, and now you’d need many layers of get-around to find those movies, although those are still out there if you try harder.
Another ten years later, here we are in 2025. The corruption issue is certainly not among the top things on people’s minds, which is why I think your information is at least 10 years out of date, especially the claim that “young people are very unhappy with the current state of corruption”. Young people simply have not experienced the level of corruption that will make them very unhappy with the current state of corruption. Xi's anti-corruption campaign created a shit ton of extra bureaucratic nonsense like asking dance club of elderly to fill fifty forms and only spend 20 rmb per person on their Chinese New Year gift purchase or what not, but by no means ineffectual. I think the top concerns on the average Chinese person’s mind today are wages, housing (which I actually think is a critical failure point of the country. housing price where I grow up increased 50 folds in 20 years), healthcare, and marriage/childcare. Corruption in China today is much more like corruption in the U.S. than in Nigeria: subtler, not a dominant factor in everyday life, but one that occasionally erupts into major scandals. I do agree that most young people think wages are bad and unemployment is bad, in a way not unlike the vibecession discussion in the US. But to be blunt it’s simply regarded to say that Chinese people by and large have not benefitted tremendously from the economic development, or better off than they were ten years ago. Claims that only a tiny fraction of people benefited from China’s meteoric rise, that only the “highly educated, successful ultranationalists”, or 富二代 who drives aston martin in Vancouver and driving up rent, or the red princelings, got their share, while everyone else was left behind, strike me as peak delusion if said by some Chinese youth and peak cope if from an American, NYT columnist or themotte frequenter. It’s just undeniable that a vast majority of Chinese people benefited materially from the CCP’s economic policies over the past two decades. Maybe one consider that to be only small achievement, but I disagree strongly. Or maybe we can do the usual “but at what cost” thing and I’ll even agree largely, but I don’t think that’s what you said.
As for “the Chinese want to be like Americans”, you’re not entirely wrong but you are still very mistaken. Again, there’s a clear progression in sentiment. Twenty years ago on Baidu Tieba, then the largest Chinese discussion forum, people requesting porn would often append “下辈子美利坚”, or “next life, America”, a pun implying a wish to be reincarnated in the US with a pun (坚means hard, as in harder penis) for a harder “weapon”. That kind of open and widespread worship of the U.S. (and, by extension, of whiteness. people even slapped “Made in Czechia” labels onto low quality chinesium as a supposed mark of superior quality) is nowhere near as common today. Those same people, I suspect, either turned into 反贼 (traitors, as pro-CCP pinkies 粉红 call them) or transitioned into 粉红 themselves. As a line from a Chinese movie goes, “they follow whoever wins”, and China has been doing a lot of “winning” lately, certainly less than those “winnologists” (赢学家, Chinese nationalists who crave winning) believe but more than enough for the mildly nationalists online to be 10x as vocal as they were before. Are people more pessimistic about their own future than a few years ago? Maybe, especially after the catastrophic handling of covid. But have they reverted to wishing everyone could be reincarnated as Americans? No. That era is gone. Maybe that’s a low bar, but a change is still a change.
It does pain me that many of my fellow countryman want to turn their cities into LED hellscapes, which in many minds signal “development”, a cargo-cult worship of I guess the American or their imaginary West with Chinese characteristics. Still, as many below have pointed out, the Chinese want to be like Americans not because your Americaness, but because you’re rich and powerful. To Americans, this distinction may seem unimportant, since being American is already synonymous with being rich and powerful. But I think it is not synonymous for most Chinese and when American economical gild fades you will see the distinction.
I’ve lurked on here for many years. My own social circle is a giant blue bubble, and this is one of the few places where I can read from a grayish-red slice of Americans who are thoughtful and articulate. Over time I’ve sensed a growing belief there that something is rotten in the US. Whatever their prescriptions for social illness, there’s a pervasive pessimism. Difficulty celebrating small wins (see the thread down below “small hiccups among decades of winning” re the OU placing the trans TA on admin leave); tech pessimism (more among general well-educated blue tribers, not here); cynicism toward government everywhere, but especially at home. Yet despite all this, most Americans on that forum still seem to believe that America, whatever she represents, is fundamentally great. They criticize her, but they also believe in her. I’d argue the Chinese are similar.
Why is it so hard to understand that, just as Americans can criticize America while loving and caring about it, the Chinese can do the same? Why assume that when they criticize the government for mishandling of covid, or flip-flop between one-child policy and infinite child policy, or letting real estate being a major source of local government income and get them hopelessly addicted to it, they are not simply voicing their concerns similar to red-blooded Americans, or like performative blue tribers ranting about silly shit, but are actually losing hope in CCP’s mandate of heaven and yearn for liberty and democracy? Why is it unthinkable that Chinese people, nationalist or not, mean what they say, not because they’re misled by the CCP, but because they’ve actually experienced the benefits of their country’s rise? Why default to cynicism when a much more straightforward explanation is available? I suspect the answer says more about Americans than it does about the Chinese.
I think we've had almost the exact opposite experience, although probably part of it is what kind of people I'm meeting now vs in 2017(ish).
A decade ago, I spent most of my time living in the pearl river delta (mostly Shenzhen) and the outlook on China and it's future was overwhelmingly positive. You're right that people were aware that there was a lot of petty corruption with people like the police, but the general sentiment was "Yeah, it's better to live in the UK or America, but China is getting better fast, there's so much opportunity, and my life will definitely be better next year than this year." In my experience that last sentiment is mostly gone. I've only spent a limited amount of time on the mainland in the past year, so now doubt I'm getting some bias, but even there the attitude among young people is "The job market is shit, wages aren't going up anymore, and I'll probably never be able to own a home/have a family/be as succesful as mom and dad." Which is a shocking change to see in such a short time. A lot of people also complain that the system isn't fair anymore. Like I said, the petty local corruption is one thing, but I heard a ton of complaints about things like a medical exam scandal (I might be misremembering) where a woman was let in who didn't pass (or something, I might be way off here) and a bunch of other scandals, often followed by comments like "This is why China is such a shit country." I never heard anything like that ten years ago. Even the people who wanted to leave wouldn't say something like that, but again, my sample set is quite biased. I can't speak Chinese well anymore, (not that I was ever great) so all my conversations are with people who can speak English or another East Asian langauge I'm fluent in. A lot of my experience with Chinese people is from dating, or people who I work with who I left for a variety of reasons, but even my limited experiences on the mainland had a completely different mood. There's still a lot of pride around China as a culture, kind of like America or Russia viewing itself as the center of the world, but not nearly as much about the current state of China. As an addendum, I do kind of get this sentiment all around the world recently though, so maybe it's a global phenomenon.
Now, back in 2015 I also spent some time in a couple small and mid sized cities (I forgot the names, frankly I've always been shit at remembering the names of things in Chinese) and it was like a different world. It wasn't really developed at all, the people weren't educated well (whereas I would say that the average person in Shanghai or Shenzhen is probably more educated than the average American) and their views of the world differed greatly as well. I suspect if I went there again I'd get a completely different experience and I have no idea what that experience would be.
So there's two things I think I should clarify here. First, when I say people are unhappy with corruption I mean something different from bribing the police or whatever. I see a lot of people complain about systemic unfairness or how Xi holding onto power is bad for the country (often using the "anti-corruption campaign" as an example of him hoarding power, which surprised me as an American considering I thought that was only a Western view)
Secondly, obviously China has improved a ton for most people. I think there is an unfortunate truth that people feel the acceleration in their standard of living much more than the standard of living itself. The so called "hedonic treadmill" is a huge factor in human psychology, and a lot of people in China seem to feel that their lives aren't getting better or maybe even getting worse, kind of like some poor people in America. I don't think either case is true (with exceptions) but I also do think the competition in life is much harder (in both cases) and expectations have become unsustainable (particularly in America, although China has absurd expectations in the dating sphere from what I understand).
I think this is quite a different phenomenon from what I experience. I know what you mean though, and this sort of weird fetishization of white people, and things like hiring a white guy to stand in front of your business to look cool is completely gone (thankfully).
I've known enough Chinese to realize that most of them don't particularly understand or admire American culture, and those who lived in America are included. It's quite difficult for a hedgemonic culture like those seen in America or China (Russia and Japan have this as well) to leave their cultural bubble. There are exceptions though, much like I'm would like to think I'm an exception as an American who really loves learning about and partaking in other cultures (particularly those types which totally dominate their own media and social spheres). I'm an absolute American chauvinist, but I'm aware of the cultural differences that exist. Somehow, that seems very rare.
I think you're completely right, but it's more complicated than that. I will say that I left this place for a long while for a reason--it's not really reflective of the American reality. This forum is full of loons who spend too much time online. While the average discourse on here is much more well reasoned and articulate, reason detached from reality won't get you anywhere. It's like people arguing about the shadows in Plato's cave. The level of discourse being higher here hides the fact that this place is pretty detached from reality, much like reddit except reddit is obviously full of clowns who can't rub two brain cells together.
I think you're right. I don't think most Chinese yearn for Democracy. I do think the way Chinese propaganda and information in general is propagated plays a huge role in how I judge Chinese people's opinions though. I'm not laboring under the delusion that Americans aren't propagandized in some way, but the difference between the information Chinese people consume and American people consumer is largely this--Americans get told what they want to hear, no matter how stupid it is. Chinese people get told what the government wants them to hear, no matter how stupid it is. I have some illustrative examples (particularly pertaining to Chinese views on Japan) but I don't really want to get into it because I don't think I've ever had a productive conversation about it with a Chinese person.
Anyways, I appreciate the effort you put into this post. Most certainly you have more experience with Chinese public opinion than I do, but I'm mostly shocked by how different it seems than it did 10 years ago. It's interesting that your experience is kind of the opposite, even if I think we're talking about different examples.
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