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Eh... I've got much more mixed feelings.
It's hard to deny China's effectiveness. The success are somewhat overstated and the failures papered over, at times -- I think China's official numbers on COVID are jokes, and for a more sympathetic case I don't think the government wants to admit how badly they've been screwed over on a number of Belt and Road Initiative operations despite their good effects -- but they're outweighed by its successes, and it's hard to overstate how significant those successes are. China has lifted itself out of staggering poverty, and much of urban China now competes with, or sometimes beats, the quality of life of European countries. News media focuses, imo wrongly, on the flashy stuff like the trains and skyscrapers and chip fabrication, and many of those are especially noteworthy because they are hard, but it's the stuff that's 'easy' and too many countries can't do that's impacted every life on the continent for the better.
And there's a lot of sympathy to go around. Dotted lines and Taiwan aren't great for modern international diplomacy, but the Opium Wars were ethical abominations, and like everyone on that side of the world that wasn't Japan, China has a lot of very valid frustrations with historic Japanese international policy and the resurgence of Japanese hard-righters.
((And I'll skip the various Great Powers questions: international politics is a game where the only rule is that the strong do what they must, and the weak suffer what they will, yada yada.))
The problem's what it chooses to do. I won't blame the CCP for the One Child Policy, since a very specific group of Westerners promoted and drove the campaign. But those Westerners were incompetent gits; government officials acting on their behalf are what lead to a demographic tree that leaves sane people praying that the stats are fake. It's that sort of problem, writ large. Chinese fishing fleets are the best in the world at strip-mining wildcaught fish, Chinese construction companies are the best in the world at building skyscrapers no one lives in, everyone knows how much a critic I am of American academic fraud and Chinese diploma mills manage to beat them at their game. These are only a tiny portion of China's success stories, but they show a country that's able to compete with Elon Musk, and yet either doesn't want to limit its space program from dropping a Tianlong misfire into a town. A populated one! Yes, there's also the human rights abuses, like an incredibly effective organ donor program, or the giant panopticon, or the forced abortion, but they're honestly symptoms.
((Indeed, a lot of great things from China occur where matters can slip through the cracks. Ghost shifts are embarrassing, but they've empowered a massive amount of Chinese and worldwide entrepreneurship. But it's not enough to point at an omelet and break eggs.))
I'll actually give the opposite criticism of Greer, here. Paeans to his specific form of anti-materialist and puritan morality have no sway on me. But where I agree with him solely that Xi's anti-corruption drives have had some beneficial effect, I can very easily see those powers being driven to more malicious ends, and likely to be so driven, and in many ways are already pushed in that sphere. That's more immediate and direct a concern from my perspective. I'm moderately aware, so far as Westerners can be aware, of how tolerance of homosexuality has ebbed from a conclusion that could credibly pretend to be more stable and family-oriented than Western celebrationism into one that's less plausibly keeping to its credo than 1990s DADT. Maybe it stops there. Maybe.
Maybe it dials back heavily on some of the bigger problems. Maybe there's one of a thousand other cultural or economic problems that it's doing great on that's next on the chopping block.
I'd argue that a state that has the mandate of heaven does not need, nor want, the level of cultural indoctrination that the Chinese government demands, but I could be persuaded I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just missing a lot of the cultural context behind scrubbing media of human bones, and the Germans do that too (how have things been working out for the Germans?). Maybe my country got lucky, and I'm vastly underestimating how many eggs you gotta break.
I know that a state that has the mandate of heaven does not need, nor want, to control the outcome of Hugo Awards, or whether a bike-sharing company CEO can fly business class, or RealSexyCyborg's tweets.
Pessimistically, this leaves the country far more fragile than it admits. If it needs these defenses against those things, it is, or believes it is vulnerable to them. Worse -- and given that over a billion people depend on them directly and closer to three billion do so indirectly, I don't just mean 'worse' for the CCP -- I'm not convinced anybody can continue that level of control permanently. AI helps a lot, but it doesn't help that much, and in many ways it's going to make the mid-term less stable.
The middle possibility holds that these are just another form of corruption, made invisible to China's internal controls because it's what those controls have been made to not recognize. So long as no one's getting too rich, a la Ma, or too conventionally powerful, it doesn't matter if they're getting the ability to enforce their will on the world writ large. And, to be fair, an unfeatherbedded bridge to nowhere is better way to enrich random blue collar types than Raytheon featherbedding a million dollars for a thirty-dollar bomb. But the NGOification of everything has more than its fair share of issues.
Optimistically, the greatest defense I can offer of that side of China is that it doesn't need nor want to do these things. They're simply easy to do, and options exist, and can be done, and thus must be done; like the United States, they are guided by the beauty of their weapons rather than the available information, and like the United States, they've poisoned the tools they could otherwise use to gather accurate information.
Which is its own damning critique.
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