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I find much to admire in the PRC, and just as much to disdain or decry.
China is one of the few countries around with real state capacity. Holy shit, it is difficult to overestimate how important that is to getting anything done. It's not so much that they started out uniquely capable, it's more that everyone else, especially in the West, entirely fumbled the ball. The America of the Hoover Dam? A distant memory. The West has decentralized so hard that it's ruled by a tyranny of the minority, with so many people with de-facto veto power that something as mundane as a metro station arrives ten years late and ten times over budget. The West intentionally threw away the keys to the kingdom, and embraced stagnation. It is easy to plateau when you start off at a peak, with your basic human necessities taken care of, and a sense of "things are basically fine".
A lot of the things the rest of the world wrings their hands over are simply addressed simply and directly by China. Worried about oil? Build so many solar panels they blot out the sun (if you're very short). The US says you can't have their fancy (Taiwanese) GPUs? Fuck it, we say no after Nvidia and its (Taiwanese) CEO lobby a retarded president into relenting. Turns out, you can have a heavily protectionist, mercantilist economy if you're really fucking good at it, and the rest of the world is entirely addicted to your products.
Turns out that there is, in fact, a reasonably acceptable exchange rate between the two. Now, I'd very much prefer the kind of freedom the US offers, but living in the Yookay, China doesn't seem so bad. The topics they censor aren't the drums I want to beat, they won't throw me in prison for discussing HBD.
At the moment, China doesn't seem to have grand imperial ambitions. They have little interest in injecting their values and mores into the lives of people who look nothing like them. If you have something that passes as a state, and you're willing to trade with them, they'll take you. There's something refreshing about relying on enlightened self-interest instead of "liberal values", even if I'm generally a fan of said values.
(There is guarantee that this self-absorption will remain indefinitely, if they become the hegemonic power)
Now, if only they'd stop being retarded about Taiwan, and the South China Sea, or Arunachal Pradesh...
Other than the US, they're also the only other country with a realistic shot at AGI, or even a mere human employment crisis. They've got the factories, and no hangups about automating everything that can be automated.
It's far from a given that the century will be Chinese, but I'm willing to nihao at some fine shit and not particularly mind. If they unbanned Reverend Insanity, the CCP has my vote.
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