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So there is a question that has been gnawing at me for the longest time: is PRC... Good? I mean:
I mean, there are obviously some tough things to get over (the whole free speech thing, how they handled COVID with safetyism that would make many in the West blush, all the other usual stuff), but genuinely, honestly... Following the news from China for a few years, I really can't help but envy the Chinese. Take down the communist iconography and I think that many on the right would see it similarly to Japan.
China is, above all, fascinating. It is a state that is capable of astonishing feats of engineering and yet it will occasionally build a bridge that will collapse within months of its completion. Its government seems at times to be preternaturally competent, and at other times to be singularly dedicated to causing misery and dysfunction for its own people. It has a cultural history as expansive and complex as any on Earth, and long periods of stability during which one would expect great works of music and visual art would have been made, and yet its actual output in these domains has been, and continues to be, distinctly third-rate. In the past, there were long periods where it was unquestionable strong enough to conquer much of the world, and yet it didn't. Today, it is—or will soon be—strong enough to expand far beyond it borders, but I expect it will again choose not to.
How do we resolve these apparent inconsistencies? Well, first I'd caution that the West is full of these too. We put men on the moon with the computing power of a graphing calculator, but we can't build a single high speed rail line in California. We descend from a culture that produced the most sublime art ever created by man, but we seem largely to have forgotten how to do this, or else lost the will to even try. With AI, we figured out how to make sand talk, but I expect we would be hopelessly incapable of maintaining a Chinese level of order in our society even if our very survival depended upon it.
What do we make of this? I think the obvious conclusion to draw is that human societies are spikey. (You may have heard this term from AI. In that context, it refers to the fact that AI can be at once astonishingly competent in one domain and incompetent in another that seems no more difficult, or perhaps even easier. A classic example was the ability of earlier generations of LLMs to get 90th percentile plus scores on the SAT math section but also to fail at counting the number of r's in strawberry.) China has a weird mix of strengths and weaknesses, and so does the West.
An interesting property of spikeyness is that it is harder to see in yourself. What is easy seems easy and what is hard seems hard, so without some external example to show that certain strengths don't necessarily imply others, and that same is true of certain weaknesses, it can be hard to imagine that these things can be unlinked. Sometimes, it is only when we look at another with a different combination of strengths and weaknesses that we start to more clearly see the spikeyness that exists in ourselves. Of course, the spikeyness of an entity with very different strengths and weaknesses is obvious.
And that is what China is: a different roll of the stats dice. It looks very weird to us, but then I'm sure we look very weird to them.
Did they get a better roll than us, overall? I don't think so, but I'm not completely sure. Are they at least our peers, civilizationally speaking? Certainly.
And the final question: are they good? Well, from my perspective they are not especially good, but also not especially bad either. One Chinese deficit—which is arguably not even a deficit except from a Western, Christianity-inflected moral standpoint—is that they just don't seem to have an interest in much of the rest of the world. The downside of this (and to be honest, I'm a little disturbed by it) is how generally indifferent they seem to suffering that exists beyond their borders. I hope this might change as they become wealthier, but the social science research I've looked at does not show this happening, at least so far. Of course, this disinterest also has an upside: to me it seems obvious the Chinese don't want to conquer the world. Maybe they are HBD pilled and recognize that Chinese style governance would only work for Chinese people (for what it is worth, this seems obviously true). Or maybe they are just such cultural chauvinists that can't imagine what good could come to them from involving themselves with others (mostly also probably true). And maybe it is just that they are temperamentally conservative and risk averse, and they feel more comfortable all crowded together on the territory they have lived on for thousands of years. It is probably a combination. But whatever it is, I just don't worry much about China going all Nazi Germany on us and trying to conquer lebensraum, and I worry even less about some sort of sino-colonialist future (maybe Africa the land could become Chinese, but Africans? Never).
This is very different than us. When the pilgrims came over to Massachusetts, the seal they created for the Massachusetts Bay Colony shows an Indian standing with a text flag coming out of his mouth that said, "Come over and help us". Yes, the universalist impulse runs deep here. That can be beautiful in my eyes, as when Kipling wrote earnestly of the White Man's Burden. And truthfully, I think it has done a lot of good for the rest of the world. But also, I can't say we have a flawless track record. What happened to those Indians? How often have we bungled the helping? How often has the helping just been a pretext to exploit, to enslave, to rape? Not always, but not never either.
As for which civilization is better for the rest of the world, the Chinese or the Western, I think the optimal solution might be a middle ground. I believe there is a White Man's Burden; I also believe there is a Chinaman's Burden. Ultimately, I'd like to see China be a little more humanitarian and universalist, even if that risks them maybe being a little more expansionist. But I also think the West could learn a lot from China. Obviously technologically and governmentally, but also culturally. The West should take a more pragmatic, more Chinese, less Marvel-universe view of its own motives and (especially) capabilities, and also a more Chinese (read: racist) view of those it aims to help, which is ironically what I think will be the key to actually helping them, rather than just pretending to. Indeed, in the long run, China and the West could have a very productive and fruitful relationship that could enrich the whole world enormously. I hope we get to see it happen.
I'm not sure where this perception comes from or if it's a specifically western blind spot, maybe some wildly out of date leftover stereotype from after the Opium Wars?
But the Belt and Road Initiative did not come from a country totally disinterested in the rest of the world. China is keenly interested in the rest of the world and quite involved in foreign policy. All that foreign policy is blatantly towards China's own ends, not some abstract ideal like "democracy". But they have lots of it. And they will apply lots and lots of pressure across many many miles to make you do what they want.
But China views the other entities the way physicists view black holes - all complexity is hidden and there is only two parameters - mass and spin. China cares only about resources, markets and shipping routes. They don't care about human rights, religion, ethnicity, who exactly is in power as long as it is stable, they are cavalier about things like pollution and whatnot. The only thing they are emotional about is Taiwan.
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