I think the wrong lesson is being taken here. China, like Russia, started from an incredibly low baseline - largely caused by authoritarian power. A new authoritarian power revitalized the economy and genuinely improved people's lives. People are generally grateful, and they have reason to be.
The fast pace of economic growth didn't necessarily come from authoritarianism (though I'll accept it helped in some ways) but from the fast catch-up. That isn't going to last forever. Growth will slow - it's slowing already. And when it does, a generation of people (who grew up wealthy) will start to think about corruption, human rights, and having a say in what goes on.
My thesis is something like "any authoritarian can sail a ship in calm seas". The government of China's hard times are ahead of it. It's too early to write an epitaph for democracy.
Apart from nothing lasts forever.. This is a speculative take too, as the OP. We don't know what will happen in China in the future. One thing is true: at the moment their change is towards more democracy and personal rights, and it's the exact opposite in the West. My theorty, a counter-theory to yours if you will, is that the wealth growth for the lower and middle classes declined or reversed in the West (US, Europe, Canada etc) since 70s, which coincides with the West divesting from industrial production and embracing the financialization of the economy. Today EU is officially applying censorship on media and trying hard on controlling the personal communications of persons, similar trends in US. We think we are better than China, but from the non-Western countries the difference isn't that big anymore.
I agree with your opinion on US/EU etc. as they have more leftism/collectivism/socialism growing. But I don't understand "One thing is true: at the moment their change is towards more democracy and personal rights" part and maybe you can provide more explanations/examples/sources/whatever?
As we see in europe and the usa, when democracy lasts too long, people get too relaxed and free and turn unhappy with random things that annoy them. They used to be at work too much to worry about them, but now they can stare at their neighbour and wonder why this 'migrant' has more than them etc. Or whatever happens to annoy them. And consequently start voting for ultimately authoritarian 'leaders', which will make everything worse for them and most others.
In europe it is exactly because people are less relaxed that they start to looking for someone to blame. Not the other way around.
They are less relaxed because power over time concentrated so much that the top is managing to kill the middle class and generally squeeze everyone. The same top is running huge marketing campaigns of blaming everything but them and as solution they offer authoritarianism and even more power concentration.
The public is too busy working to be able to analyze the issue correctly. Plus political education has disappeared from schools and has been methodologically deleted by the top.
Instead of framing it as “why does this migrant have more than others”, maybe it’s worth looking at the real issue: why is my job being outsourced to someone overseas?
Democracy took away that person's job and now those voters want someone authoritarian who will bring it back.
The sea was not calm in 2010s, and certainly not in 2020s. Predictions to China’s collapse has been circulating for the past 15 years, and it just never panned out.
Unsurprisingly, when you have authoritarianism that’s at least mildly supported by the citizens, you can do wonders with 1.4B people. At some point, we have to give them credit where it’s due.
> The sea was not calm in 2010s, and certainly not in 2020s.
China had double digit gdp growth in 2000s, high single digit in 2010s, and still decent single digit in 2020s - that is until a year or so ago. These are the calm seas that used to be but are no longer.
Geo politically China has and will always be squeezed, just by their geographic location. But economically they were flying ahead in the last few decades, and everything is so much easier while you have strong economic growth. Growth that they are struggling to realize suddenly... this will be a huge change and challenge for internal politics in China going forward.
Because when people are getting wealthier each year then they are happy. But as soon as that stops, then it's like when the music stops and people have to find the first available chair to sit on. Those that don't find one will be unhappy.
I'm calling the modern history of the CCP "a ship on calm seas". It's easy to be popular when everyone is going from poor to rich. That will not continue forever.
> And when it does, a generation of people (who grew up wealthy) will start to think about corruption, human rights, and having a say in what goes on.
Maybe. But what happens when that group of people are suppressed and it takes a lot longer for them to become brave and speak up? Meanwhile, the government of China will become more powerful and be more of a hegemonic power than America ever was. That may extend their ability to govern and remain authoritarian. Not just for their citizens, but against other regions they unfortunately control like Hong Kong or Taiwan or Tibet or Xinjiang.
Luckily the democratic west has been setting a really good example so there's no way a hegemonic China can get away with genocide, chopping up journalists, poisoning the air, causing famines, ignoring international bodies, committing war crimes, torturing people, toppling other country's governments, invading nations on flimsy pretexts...
And all that's before counting whatever Trump manages to ruin before his time is up.
> My thesis is something like "any authoritarian can sail a ship in calm seas". The government of China's hard times are ahead of it. It's too early to write an epitaph for democracy.
This applies to neither Russia nor China. Especially not China – authoritarian China if the 50s-70s was a complete clusterfuck every which way, in no small part due to Mao's staggering incompetence. A key part of Xiaoping's reforms of the 80s – which lifted hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty – was renouncing some of Mao's more mad notions.
There are plenty of other examples where authoritarians screwed over their countries quite badly, from Mugabe to Suharto to Maduro. To say nothing of people like Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, and similar jolly fellows who outright murdered their own people by the millions.
In authoritarian regimes you have no meaningful pushback. When Putin says "we're going to invade Ukraine real quick, stoke me a kipper, back before supper" then no one is going to say "you idiot, that's fucking mental" because you risk brutally accidentally falling out of the window while taking a shower. And now Russia is "stuck" in this pointless war because Putin has painted himself in a corner, and there is not going to be a peaceful change of governance in Russia, after which a new administration can change course.
In addition authoritarians are free to be as corrupt as they like of course. Who is going to hold them to account?
In the short term an authoritarian can do the right thing (Xiaoping is an example), but in the long term it never works out because sooner or later an idiot and/or asshole will plant their arsecheeks on the throne, after which you're fucked.
> in the long term it never works out because sooner or later an idiot and/or asshole will plant their arsecheeks on the throne, after which you're fucked.
Seems like this can happen in a democracy just the same.
I wonder why India has not had the same success when its in a similar situation, is the domecratic power worse than the authoritarianism ( at least in the case of China). Or would you say India will eventually catch up and be better for the democracy.
The blog post reads like propaganda - hitting on the same old metrics like GDP by PPP (ignoring all the other metrics that are getting worse).
Who cares if it's the largest economy? What matters is productivity per person, which is around what Thailand produces - $13,000 USD per capita.
One question I love asking is the pro-China faction is - assuming China grows at 5% per year (it's no longer growing at 7-8%), how long would it take to catch up to the US on a GDP per capita basis with the US growing an anemic 2%?
What people forget is the US growing at 2% is equivalent to to China growing at 12% (since per capita GDP is 6x).
China needs to stop their slowing economy all in an environment of reduced global trade and a terrible demographic shift.
Retirement age in China has been around 55. If you go to China, you’ll see a ton of older retired people traveling around the country on high speed trains. You won’t find that many young people during day time. So that factor into GDP per capita.
But besides GDP per capita, I think your criticism of GDP PPP per capita is wrong. You can live a very decent life in China. In some ways, it’s superior to Americans for many Chinese people. You just have to go to China to see it for yourself.
Great when you have a democratic world that provides you with the technologies. Not that great when you dont have democratic world that provides you with the technologies.
Yes, it's quite easy to keep people content with an invasive autocracy and human right violations when you have staggering economic growth and a sharp rise in quality of life to show for it.
It's not just China. A big part of why Putin in Russia has managed to hold onto power for so long was that Russia's recovery from the collapse of USSR was happening during his first two presidential terms. Even though very little of that recovery could be attributed to Putin's policies.
The same holds for democracy too. Good economy makes for content population. But if your country's economy is going to shit, that doesn't bode well for whatever party that happens to be in charge - and might even open the doors for an authoritarian takeover.
> A new authoritarian power revitalized the economy
Fantasy history there. No, the actual timeline: USA determined that USSR-CPC split and animosity were real and should be exploited. China, a social and economic basketcase, also saw the benefit of pivoting to the West.
Then (fortuitously for the Chinese ..) Mao died and Deng Xiaping came to power and then to the US and wore a cowboy hat! Western Capitalists* , whether due to their cupidity (or stupidity), convinced themselves that massive investment, funds, and technology transfer to Communist China would somehow engender a "liberal China" in a generation.
Even after CPC crushed the "liberal" front in its cadre in 1989, which should have been a wakeup call to the idiot class that rules the West, we had 8 years of Slick Willy letting China get their hands on all sorts of tech and secret in US and the West.
And now, the Orange Clown is finishing "the job" by laying waste to US aliances and institutions, making sure 21st is irrevocably the Chinese Century.
So that, hn, is how China actually got to "eat the world".
> And now, the Orange Clown is finishing "the job" by laying waste to US aliances and institutions, making sure 21st is irrevocably the Chinese Century.
I’m going to concur with others here. It’s not irrecoverable. And the future isn’t yet written.
China has had the fortune (even eclipsing the US) of being a giant market of burgeoning consumers and massive amount of labor. The US first won this economic opportunity partially through immigration and a well-timed WW2 victory. Now its chinas turn to wield consumerism.
That said, China also has the misfortune of a serious risk for population collapse due, in part, to the prior 1 child policy. They’re aging faster than the US and others nations, and that will dramatically shift their economic output, consumption, and of course strain government resources. They also don’t have a culture of immigration like the US to slow the change. It would take a major global shift to see large immigration into China. There are other major economic risks they face, like their real estate debt, but the population collapse does pose a significant threat to stunt or reverse their ascendance.
TLDR: China could be the next Japan, not the next US.
You forget some characteristics of China's political economy that make their quality of life improvements way bigger and are not accounted for in this story. For example, the unprecedented investment in clean energy is seamlessly (compared to the west at least) followed by improvements to the grid. The central planner knows the plan, so he can account for the infrastructure necessary, which is not true for capitalist countries. The USA is laughably behind other powers in terms of basics like mass transportation and energy partly because of this coordination issue. No need to get started with how ahead China is with internet infrastructure, too, right?
Western Capitalists didn’t and don’t give two shits about a liberal China. The investments were made and technologies transferred because the Chinese government required them in order for Western companies to access China’s enormous pool of stable and cheap labor. As for this being the Chinese century, I think it’s not an inevitability. Japan at one point also looked like it had a shot of becoming a dominant economic superpower.
I do not think the 21st century is necessarily already determined. China had suffered so much in the 20th century, including famine and revolution and yet they still rose.
What Trump did so far is a farce but it's recoverable.
History is too unpredictable to determine which nation is the winner of the 21st century. Anybody who claims to know the future have too much certainty about the course of history.
@yubblegum nails it - well written. I might add a couple of things:
- China had a free look at what Japan did so well 70s-90s
- China had a free look at Russia and most definitely did not repeat their mistakes economically. Russia ought to be the most embarrassed of all how well done China has done.
- the above two points are compliments to china: they take statecraft far smarter abd seriously for them. Similarly, China isn't stupid enough to start a war (Ukraine) they couldn't mop up with a low level adversary. But Russia is because they're fragile that way.
- China under Nixon sided with the US and the west, who had solid currency to pay for goods. That helped a lot.
- we Americans made the same mistake germany did with Russian energy: economic ties are not a by way to western liberlization. You can't buy off Russia from invading.
- and as for us Americans: we didn't protect ourselves in job losses through nafta, or China. It wasn't woke liberal politicians who sent jobs overseas or to canada/Mexico or china. It was private corporate owners/boards. And yes, they are a special kind of stupid if they couldn't see the long game china played. China had a long game; US only saw $ signs. Good lord! China was never going to allow dominance in manufacturing or access to Chinese markets by outsiders. The British made sure of that. Period.
- the US is now at a point where job security is more important than cheap crap at 5 and below, while china has moved onto high end. The days of trading lower consumer prices for job losses is waning.
In this kind of analysis it is always something that is done to or for China. The latter never has any kind of agency. Neither the will nor mind of its own. If that were true China would have stayed a complete and utter shithole no matter the investment whether political, intellectual, financial or scientific.
You know, the whole git 'master' branch stuff has many in the USA exhausted about arguing over words and their meaning.
A good shortcut is to just invent and use new words. USSR-PRC is probably better than arguing over CPC or CCP, which itself probably comes from the Russian CCCP as the Alaska Trump-Putin meeting made me notice.
As per Google: CCCP is the Cyrillic form of the Russian acronym СССР, which stands for Союз Советских Социалистических Республик (Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik).
Other things that may be beneficial to do: not anthropomorphizing countries and using the neuter "it", saying "X government" like USG instead of "Washington DC." Using stand-ins like Washington DC for US Government another word is called metonymy.
China was the world’s largest economy for 18 of the past 20 centuries (with exceptions being parts of the 19th and 20th centuries, when Western Europe and then the U.S. surged ahead after the industrial revolution).
And China is no longer just catching up in many industries, it is leading innovation[1]. Many in China believe they are simply returning to their natural state being the world’s number one economy.
Your analysis is through the lens of Western culture. The definition and understanding of freedom and harmony are entirely different in China. I was in China and experienced this myself, so this is firsthand experience, not something I picked up from blogs or news. And China is not like Russia at all, Russia fills its government with oligarchs, while China fills it with science and technology experts[2]
> And when it does, a generation of people (who grew up wealthy) will start to think about corruption, human rights, and having a say in what goes on.
In the Chinese context, freedom is defined collectively (freedom from chaos, poverty, or foreign domination etc), whereas here in the West it's individual liberty. Harmony and social stability are seen as more valuable than political pluralism, so authoritarian governance is culturally framed as legitimate.
Chinese leaders and citizens remember periods of fragmentation and civil war (warlord era, Japanese invasion, cultural revolution).
There is a widespread belief that adopting a Western adversarial political model could reintroduce instability and weaken national unity so something China cannot risk given its size and diversity.
That is the main reason this will not happen, you will not see a liberal style democracy in China. This claim is repeated all the time, but it is a total misunderstanding of their culture, ethnicity, and history. China has a long history of centralized, bureaucratic governance (over 2k years since the Qin Dynasty), where stability and order are prioritized.
Well said. The western definition of freedom as only individual freedom is not a good one. It is the same definition that allowed people to argue for keeping slaves, keeping other humans as their property, because "I have the freedom to do what I want with my property". And during the civil rights era, the same was true with "You can't tell me not to discriminate, I have the freedom to do what I want with my property, and my business is my property".
China works as a society to truly try to help their people. They invest in their country and people. That is why they are prospering. It's not just "catching up".
The US for example doesn't take care of it's people. They do the absolute bare minimum in the name of illusionary "freedom". The only people who are free are the rich.
Call it whatever you want.. but there is great benefit in having a government who recognizes that society comes first- not the individual.
Compare the social programs of China to the social programs of the US. USA has Supplemental Security Income, Medicare, Social Security, emergency rooms cannot turn away patients. There's friction, but the US definitely does take care of its _old_ people. What's the equivalent in China? I'm not saying they don't, but I'd like to know.
You’re going back and forth between two concepts: society and its people. Look at the Covid lockdowns for evidence of how much China (or other Chinese for that matter) care about individuals.
This is a very naive view of what goes on in China. Not saying China doesn’t do anything right, but it’s far from the utopia you seem to think it is. There’s pretty rampant corruption at all levels of government and business, even to the point the central government acknowledges that repeated reforms are necessary. There are also plenty of billionaires in China who, along with the rich and well connected (often one and the same), enjoy a level of privilege and freedom unimaginable to the ordinary people. China’s social safety net has also been eroding to the point that if someone really has to depend on the state to take care of them, they’d be living a very meager life indeed.
My take is if you look at Chinese people anywhere outside China, say in the US, Singapore or wherever they are hard working, educated and prosperous, it's a cultural thing to a large extent. In China they were reduced to poverty by communism and are now catching up with their brethren elsewhere and still a fair way behind the US, Singa etc on a per capita basis.
Precisely. And you'll see parallels across other similar communities - Gujaratis, Persians, Keralites, Armenians, Jews, Punjabi Sikhs, Lebanese Maronites, Ahmadiyyas, Sindhis, Parsees and Dawoodi Bohras, etc. All communities which faced/face historical or modern-day persecution, or rampant corruption and cronyism in their original regions, but tend to do miraculously well once they leave them behind.
Either these people will migrate abroad and improve their host countries, or their home countries will grow a brain and beg them to stay behind with carrots. Lots of carrots. Like China.
Communism does not take off in stable prosperous societies because there isn't a market for it. It quite literally requires an underclass of people unhappy enough to stake their lives on establishing a different social order.
I am not particularly worried about authoritarian in China in long term.
Western especially the US has long been the release valve for CCP to manage dissidents and alike, and it’s been quite effective, countless young souls looking for freedom was assimilated and became faceless in the capitalism machinery abroad, instead of fighting for their future in China.
The self enshitification of USA will slowly but surely close that loophole CCP has been enjoying, and force more young Chinese to make China a better place for themselves as they will have no other choices.
> The fast pace of economic growth didn't necessarily come from authoritarianism
You're right. The fast pace of growth came from the policies that encourage ruthless capitalism. You can see that Chinese government controls business like oil and tobacco, but it gives tons of freedom for business owners to run wild.
> Chinese government [...] gives tons of freedom for business owners to run wild
This claim is provably incorrect.
> Analysis of all 37.5 million registered firms in China reveals that 65% of the largest 1,000 private owners have direct equity ties with state owners […] The number of private owners with direct equity ties with the state almost tripled between 2000 and 2019, and those with indirect equity ties rose 50-fold.
> Provincial and local government officials in China enforce laws and control resources, such as land and loans, but these officials change positions every few years. […] Publicly listed firms increase perk spending (travel, dining, and entertainment) by an average of 3.6 million yuan (20%) when new local officials take charge. […] The results are consistent with the view that local officials are important gatekeepers and firms seek to influence them with perks and positions of power within SOEs.[1][2]
> China’s domestic politics have changed significantly over the past decade, with the top leadership enacting much more muscular policies to limit the power of large corporations while also deploying extensive measures to support firms, especially in key industries. According to Hsieh, this trend means that companies need to navigate the state’s “two strong hands,” one supportive and the other restrictive which aim to increase the party’s control over the economy even as the private sector continues, in one form or another, to grow. Moreover, political control is likely proving oppressive for companies as the party-state increasingly weights national security over economic growth. […] These findings […] suggest that not all government intervention in the economy is welcome by Chinese companies, especially if it comes with national security strings attached. The findings from the experiment suggest that state and party influence on private firms may have evolved to prioritize politics above economic growth, creating new challenges for companies that would naturally seek to maximize political support alongside autonomy.[3]
The problem is more acute and current . China has not enough white collar work. It has no pension system , usually the 4 grandparents move in with their kids. Who must provide income for 6+ person households. Which only whit collar work can do. Or investments,like flats etc.
China is spiralling right now, not tomorrow , today.
> China, like Russia, started from an incredibly low baseline - largely caused by authoritarian power. A new authoritarian power revitalized the economy and genuinely improved people's lives. People are generally grateful, and they have reason to be.
Besides the ideological component here being embarrassingly incoherent (the bad was caused by "authoritarian power" in general; the good was caused by "a new authoritarian power" in particular) your facts are plain wrong. The low baseline was pre-Mao (and pre-Lenin) when famine, illiteracy, technological impoverishment, and labor immobility was the rule. Deng's opening up certainly was something, but it undoubtedly stood upon the shoulders of the Mao era. Even the WEF agrees: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/06/how-china-got-rich-4...
> But the “conventional wisdom” ignores the fact that — even inclusive of the serious mistakes, lost lives and lost years that some insist define the early decades after 1949 — the foundations laid during Mao’s rule, including land reform and redistribution, substantial investments in heavy industry, public health, literacy, electrification, and transportation gave China a substantial leg up. These developments positioned China for takeoff well ahead of the official inauguration of Reform and Opening in 1978. While Deng’s reforms catalyzed China’s economic takeoff, they built upon critical foundations established during Mao’s era, which are often overlooked.
Even the WEF is wrong, of course, because they do the usual thing of inflating the importance of GDP; GDP has virtually no applicability to a socialist economy and the "revitalization" you speak of was, as far as its quantitative measure, a magic trick. A literal capitalization upon decades of labor mobilization.
The final paragraphs were the more interesting ones IMO. Especially the closing sentence:
> The tragedy isn’t that China is winning, it’s that the West stopped imagining better futures.
This one hits close to home. I saw an improvement in quality of life between the 90s and maybe 2005, but not so much since then. Not to say that there hasn't been progress, I mean tablets and pervasive internet & smartphone usage was unthinkable back then. But my life isn't any better for them. Cities feel worse, more congested, less money for public transport, more littering. Nature is disappearing all around me. Energy is WAY more expensive. Food quality is worse. Pollution seems worse. Hell, people seem worse, somehow?
Maybe this is all the disenchantment of middle age (or slumbering depression). But I haven't seen any political projects that fill me with joy in a very long time. Only dread. From shitty "free" trade agreements to Chat Control. Pouring more concrete and reducing train services. Endless austerity because we can no longer afford healthcare and/or pensions.
Yet at the same time, economic growth has mostly kept going, but it isn't translating to improved quality of life for Average Joe.
It's interesting you say energy has been getting more expensive. I was just thinking the other day how crazy it is that i've been paying about ~$3 a gallon since 07-08. It's remarkable actually.
It was the point where people stopped listening to people who know what they are talking about, and instead to other idiots on social media, and "news" that was given a strong slant to appeal to a particular audience.
Democracy can't work when people don't have a functioning 4th estate.
Maybe it's not a coincidence that public services got worse when everything moved online.
In the process lots of things have been captured by private companies that consolidated and got richer and more powerful than many countries.
Now we have a bunch of rent seekers who don't support our local economies, but pour profits through Bermuda-Luxembourg money funnels into their Scrooge McDuck vaults.
Once Deng Xiaoping did his reforms and opening up, it removed much of the impediments that Mao's CCP caused, and China was able to develop super fast. But recently I am a little concerned that Xi Jinping's rule is a bit of a return to some Mao-style authoritarian principles that are likely to hamper growth.
* Economic growth slowed down significantly under Xi Jinping compared to his predecessor Hu Jintao. Also, while Xi handled the start of the Covid pandemic well, he sort of fumbled the recovery afterwards with too heavy-handed quarantine/daily testing policies.
* China has demonstrated that it's super good at AI stuff, publishing lots of papers, having extremely talented engineers at Deepseek, etc, but after Deepseek stunned the world with the R1 model, subsequent models got heavily censored and languished in relative obscurity.
* China continues to have a brain drain of talented scientists and engineers to the US and other parts of the world. A large proportion of the top talent at Google, OpenAI, xAI, Meta, etc, are Chinese-American.
* From my anecdotal experience, many young people in China feel helpless and unmotivated due to the hyper-competitive environment and lack of opportunities. It is common to find healthy young adults who would rather "lie flat" than work. Together with an extremely aging population due to the one-child policy, this does not bode well for the future.
Anyway, I just wish China would just continue opening up, namely to get rid of the great firewall. In the age of information it is lame that information flow in and out of the country is so restricted. On one hand, as this article points out, the rest of the world is ignorant of the advances in China. On the other hand, the Chinese people are also ignorant of many things outside.
That firewall isn't going away anytime soon. Americans are inundated with a deluge of foreign influence campaigns from a variety of foreign powers and no way China wants that pain revisited upon themselves.
>but after Deepseek stunned the world with the R1 model, subsequent models got heavily censored and languished in relative obscurity.
I'm pretty sure this isn't what happened. DeepSeek just hasn't released a big model upate. But in the meantime, Qwen, Bytedance, Ziphu and Moonshot AI have released extremely impressive models, some of which are SOTA or close to it. The open source/open weight world is still in love with Chinese labs as they keep releasing cool stuff and filling the void left by Meta and Mistral.
None of these are SOTA in any benchmark I've seen. Some of them get in the top 10 or top 5 some times.
What these Chinese models have that is interesting is that they are much cheaper to run and they are open source. This has pushed the other closed source SOTA models to make all the big updates we have seen the last few months. I guess we can thank these Chinese models for creating some competitive pressure, which has pushed the forefront, but they aren't doing so by leading the forefront.
China did reinforcement learning at scale in the real world. They essentially dedicated a decade for exploration, inviting experts from all countries to some local area (each expert/country of origin combo in a different one) and developed it according to what experts advised. Then they evaluated the changes, took the best performing ones and went into full exploitation mode, spreading those lessons throughout the China. They also had a large part of Africa for additional experiments on what worked.
> Anyway, I just wish China would just continue opening up, namely to get rid of the great firewall.
To become the next Rome, China would have to open up and let itself be infected by the rest of the world. It's a rite of passage, with no guarantee that it will have the constitution to endure the culture shock and the subsequent fever. How do you expose 1.4 billion minds to new perspectives, while also keeping everyone paddling in the same direction?
You missed how they quickly caught up (even surpassed the west in some cases) in vehicle manufacturing, electronics like phones and 5G, drones. Where they haven’t quite yet, they are very very close.
Most people don't realize but the biggest thing China has going on for it is the start-up scene in semiconductors.
There's too much focus on the chip production in the news, but the industry ecosystem is much bigger than that. Especially chip design and design automation are stagnated fields in the West because of the limited talent pool and lack of investment. You guys here are used to all the VC money, but in HW development world the story is different. There's simply a lack of investors to put down 10s of millions with 5-10 years horizon. Couple this with lack of talent: there aren't enough EE graduates with necessary training, you get a bleak situation. So most if the industry relies on foreigners from developing countries: Iran, China, India, Bangladesh.. Now that those Chinese EEs have better prospects at home, most of them are returning back to China to start their own companies.
Similar trend is happening in design automation tools. We have 3 monopolies in the West extracting 20-30 peecent of the revenue from the semicon companies. There are competitors showing up in China. They aren't on par yet but it's just SW, so it's a matter of time. Since there's competition their pricing is so much better too. Unfortunately we don't have access to these SW, but Chinese companies do.
Yes. It's the best thing happened for the Chinese semiconductor ecosystem. All those Chinese phones, networking equipment etc can't risk using the suppliers in the West as it can be shut down with a decree. Now Huawei, Xiaomi etc are funding so many start-ups and they are buying their products even if it's slightly worse than the state-of-the-art. The next generation of chips are going to be state-of-the-art for sure as there's not much of a gap.
Chinese companies used to open design offices in the West to keep connected to the talent here. In the last 6 months they're massively divesting. This means EEs in China will be valued even more. Add this to 80% of the research in the field happening in Chinese universities now (as opposed to less than 10% 20 years ago), they have everything nicely aligned.
They have been pushing for independence for a while now but sanctions and tarrifs will push it all to go faster. And it is a big mistake: the west has some type of misplaced arrogance that china wont catch up that fast because asml, nvidia etc but I would not be so sure. Like more said here: a disadvantage is authoritarian but thats also an advantage: Xi can just command everyone to go one way and 'defeat the west'. And seems he is doing exactly that.
I have a cognitive dissonance between valuing freedom and privacy and China's level of development (because of/in spite of limited freedom).
My hopes for China fall into 2 main camps:
- Measured increases in personal freedom. Restricting information serves to slow the viral spread of minority/non-mainstream opinions (i.e. limiting the reach of a vocal minority), but keeping the population from being exposed to "bad" information is only beneficial as long as the government is "good".
- Acknowledge/continue working on current issues (demographic issues, housing market, domestic consumption). The worst that can happen to a country is that they trick themselves with their own lies (a common trope in many films featuring non-Western countries).
Interested in hearing thoughts/rebuttals/additions on this.
Disclaimer: I am ethnically Chinese but grew up outside the country.
I feel like democratic nations have a similar issue in that information players often have a big advantage and ordinary people have no chance in getting a correct story. Personally I feel overwhelmed with how much a person has to keep up with just to cast a few votes correctly every now and them.
At the very least, democracy is a comprehensive strategy and multiple policies must in place simultaneously to approach the leading cases of success that we see in current times, such as decades of great education.
Democracy isn't really about the people having a say. Especially not having to be correct. That's window dressing on the core advantage, which is regime change without bloodshed. Under other systems of government, prominent supporters of the old regime generally lost their lives or were exiled.
Regime change without bloodshed changes the incentives for rulers enough that it's worth them building anad preserving things rather than just extracting as much as possible for themselves and their families and supporters. There's the chance they can come back.
In San Francisco, renters always vote for more lottery-based low income housing which add cost and regulation to new buildings instead of decreasing regulation to build more. Even in a democracy, leaders have a way of convincing people to vote opposite of what they truly want.
Disclaimer: I am ethnically Chinese but grew up outside the country.
Let me ask you an interesting question. What do you consider as freedom? The ability to own a gun or the ability to walk outside without ever having the chance of randomly shot dead?
Because most Chinese people believe the latter is freedom while most Americans believe the former is freedom. Since most people on HN are Americans, freedom is defined as the former here.
Finland 100/100
.....
United States 84/100
.....
China 9/100
......
Turkmenistan 1/100
Before claiming a hidden agenda or conflicts of interest of those behind the organization, first evaluate their methodology [2]. You may even agree with the methodology but argue that the actual numbers were calculated incorrectly
> the ability to walk outside without ever having the chance of randomly shot dead
This is a good measure of risk perception, and you can even use it as one of the freedom scores. The problem is that it is hard to measure. For example, consider if this measure is based on a poll: if an act of terrorism occurs just before the poll is taken, the score will definitely drop. However, in countries where such news is heavily suppressed (e.g., the former USSR), the scores may appear perfect.
We have freedom and safety when we are able to carry a gun and make a walk as we please whenever we want with very low risk for our life, and we can also chose not to hold a gun and not to make a walk at moment defined by other without any change in threat for our life.
European here: There are sooooo many other freedoms you aren't considering at all. Typical American exceptionalism. "American values are the only values". I am saying so with a gentle snobbish roll of the eyes.
I think a lot of that dissonance comes from the adversarial framing that is always pushed about China. That it's China vs the US or China vs the west. Americans especially have grown up with the idea that communist china is terrible and capitalist America is good for many decades. The reality demands a far more nuanced view of government and economy. As well as facing hard truths about values like freedom. Not to mention reckoning with the western individualist mindset.
If anything this should open our eyes that there are more paths in front of us to take than a simple dichotomy.
Agree that reality is always more nuanced than the simple views pushed by news and the (mainstream) internet.
Unfortunately oversimplified, pre-digested informational slop is easy to convey and satisfying to ingest. Nuanced viewpoints take flak from both sides of people who have absorbed the former kind of information.
It is definitely interesting (annoying?) how it is often taken as a given that China is an enemy of the US rather than a competitor in the global scene with values both in common and in disagreement. Perhaps there is some colonial/empire-building projection going on, or the US wants to keep being the only country to meddle in other countries' politics.
I need to find the quote, but historian and political commentary Adam Tooze suggested a few months ago that China's global economic and political dominance in this century could be so total that future historians will come to think of the entire modern history of Europe and the US as a mere setup for China becoming what it is. I find myself thinking about this almost every day.
>China's global economic and political dominance in this century could be so total that future historians will come to think of the entire modern history of Europe and the US as a mere setup for China becoming what it is
That's surely an interesting take when their demographics are absolutely imploding, and their economy is rife with state sponsored excess funded by debt.
Say what you will about capital markets, but they do tend to deliver things that are actually desired and economically valuable given the right pricing incentives.
I've long argued that we should replace our income tax with a progressive but heavy carbon tax. This would be far more effective than federal greenhouse gas regs and incentive programs. Unfortunately they're politically dead on arrival because they would tax the rich, powerful and politically connected far more than your average joe.
China still has 1/3 of the population living in rural areas. They can support their infrastructure and growth for the time being until they find a way out of the population problems. By the time it becomes a real problem for them, it could be worse everywhere else in the world due to insane amount of investments in automation.
> That's surely an interesting take when their demographics are absolutely imploding, and their economy is rife with state sponsored excess funded by debt.
“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.”
- Sun Tzu, The Art of War
I don't believe any of the stats coming out of China. I think it is best to approach data coming out of adversarial countries with lots of paranoia.
That's surely an interesting take when their demographics are absolutely imploding, and their economy is rife with state sponsored excess funded by debt.
If anti-aging tech arrives in the next two decades, demographic will stop imploding, their and everyone else. It becomes a matter of execution.
I've long argued that we should replace our income tax with a progressive but heavy carbon tax. This would be far more effective than federal greenhouse gas regs and incentive programs. Unfortunately they're politically dead on arrival because they would tax the rich, powerful and politically connected far more than your average joe.
Piguovian taxes and LVT are good ideas if politically difficult to implement, yet I am cautiously optimistic. There had been news about accurate appraisal of land in Baltimore that made local media coverage.
>and their economy is rife with state sponsored excess funded by debt.
Whereas the US is better with state sponsored VC funded debt ?
>but they do tend to deliver things that are actually desired and economically valuable given the right pricing incentives.
No, they don't. Any look at the market in the past 15 years will tell you that they don't, and that nothing major or of value has been produced by "the market". It's all propped on debt and infinite money printing.
Even with an imploding population, they still will be graduating more scientists and engineers than the entire combined west. Furthermore, AI and automation is going to mitigate and offset this in the developed world.
The thing I keep coming back to with China is that it's (mostly) mono-ethnic and that ethnicity is rapidly aging, such as South Korea and Japan. The birth rate is tragic, and soon they're going to have a lot of infrastructure and old people and no one around to support it.
The other shoe that is waiting to drop is the amount of spending and shadowy debts that to prop up the real estate industry. The vast majority of Chinese have invested their life savings into what looks like a mirage.
Thirdly, they've become the world's factory. But now now they've priced themselves out and it's moving to places like Vietnam and India. So now what's left? Consumer spending? High tech? It looks like they need to reinvent themselves again.
the USA was worried that Japan would take over/buy up the USA in the late 80s, esp. after Sony bought Columbia Pictures and Mitsubishi bought Rockefeller Center in NYC.
The dominance of the West came from the industrial revolution. The countries that industrialized first could generate such a massively higher economic output per capita that they could easily dominate all pre-industrial nations. This level of advantage hadn't been seen since the last fundamental change in human society from hunter-gatherer to agrarian. China may well be the dominant state of the 21st century, but their advantage will be incremental unless there is some similar breakthrough waiting to happen that will occur in China first.
Their edge will be population size. For China to remain less economically powerful than the US their standard of living must remain massively below that of the US.
Adam Tooze's grandfather was one of the most notorious Soviet moles/traitors in British history, so I guess I don't find it surprising that he's found a new Communist regime to hang his hat on. (For anyone saying 'he can't choose his family'- Tooze famously dedicated his first book in effusive praise for his grandfather)
Anyone who makes such breathless predictions about the future is automatically worth dismissing. At no point in history did any such opinions ever play out to be true.
You're saying nothing dramatic or surprising has ever happened in history, or at best that when it did, no one saw it coming. Both are obviously wrong.
In any case, Tooze is a serious thinker who has written various things besides this line I paraphrased from a podcast. I recommend checking out his work.
Do you really think the Western, especially the US hegemony would go down without a bang?
Sure, China might rule over the ashes, but I wouldn't make large bets over what the world would look like when the tensions that have accumulated over the past 30 years explode catastrophically.
China has built its own enormous internal market—its own tourism, its own brands, its own everything. They've turned inward not from isolation but from self-sufficiency.
Not sure how the title matches with this line at all.
In any case, these kinds of analyses always seem really shallow and historically ignorant to me. I can totally buy the idea that China will become a dominant economic player in the world, if it isn't already. This seems like an obvious, borderline mundane observation to make.
What would be more insightful is an analysis of China and the West that factors in three big things:
1. How the unique aspects of America basically make it impossible for the the country to be in the position China was in during the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is to say, a total disaster, beset by civil wars, colonial acquisitions, invasions, on and on. No matter how much China outcompetes America, I don't think it will ever be in that sort of situation. The military and national security state, plus the sheer amount of personal firearms, pretty much guarantees IMO that the US is basically impregnable from outside military interventions. 19th century China had neither of these things. And so I think you're inevitably going to have, at worst, a multipolar world, if not a directly bipolar one.
2. More broadly, how the cultural dynamics of the West led to the Reformation, Wars of Religion, Renaissance, and Industrial Revolution and to the West being the dominant power in the first place. And more importantly, if those cultural trends are still active, even if they are somehow dormant. If you don't factor these in, your picture of history is extremely short-term and basically dependent on contemporary predictions of the future. (See: predictions of Japan in the 1980s.)
3. And more recently, how the "enemy" of the Soviet Union prompted the US to behave more competitively and feel pressured to perform. See, for example, the Space Race. I don't really get the sense that China is anywhere near occupying the same place in the American imagination right now, and so there isn't much of a competitive spirit. There seem to be rumblings of one developing in the last decade, but it's still not quite there. If it ever develops, certainly it's going to be a factor.
> The military and national security state, plus the sheer amount of personal firearms, pretty much guarantees IMO that the US is basically impregnable from outside military interventions.
I find that a bit naive.
First, as for the point about firearms, I honestly don't think this is very relevant for the ability of a state to defend itself. Lots of firearms in civil possession might make life harder for domestic police - because they have (at least in theory) some obligation to protect the state's citizens and their property, even those citizens with firearms. So they cannot arbitrarily overpower those people.
An invading army has no such qualms. Just have a look at the wars that are currently going on, or the US' own invasions in the past. They have rockets, drones, airstrikes, artillery, tanks and all the other goodies at their disposal and will generally avoid getting anywhere near where your firearm could hit them. They won't try to arrest you, they'll simply blow up your house.
The second point has merit: The US not only has the most powerful national military in the world, it's also the leader of the most powerful international military alliance. Not to mention it is still at the center of the global trading and financial system, as well as the internet. Because of those factors, a chance of invasion is nil.
But that's nothing uniquely American, it just reflects the amount of power America currently has. Britain was in a similar position two centuries ago and Spain before that. It might change again.
> How the unique aspects of America basically make it impossible for the the country to be in the position China was in during the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is to say, a total disaster, beset by civil wars, colonial acquisitions, invasions, on and on. No matter how much China outcompetes America, I don't think it will ever be in that sort of situation.
Generals are always preparing to fight the previous war.. Look at China's actions (or the West's, for that matter). Rarely is it an invasion with guns and bombs (with the notable exception of the US Middle East policy). Mostly it's slow economic takeover. What good will guns do you, when to sell your wares, you need permission from a Chinese market owner [1], or when the only jobs are in Chinese-owned chains and conglomerates?
It won't be as bad, but it could be differently bad - for all the invasions China suffered, they are still today 91% ethnically Han-Chinese [2], in stark contrast to the dramatic demographic transformation of the US since 1965.
It's hard to imagine what could even constitute a modern Sputnik moment, but it's an interesting thought experiment. I just don't think that Americans care enough, and both countries are way more dependent on each other than the US and USSR ever were.
Caveat I've been wrong on pretty much every political prognostication I've ever made, so buy some defense industry stocks.
Maybe US gets really good at maglev trains and in reprisal China goes full throttle on inventing teleportation/hyperdrive tech?
Before the Meiji Restoration or the unification of Mongolia, the economy and population of China dwarfed Japan and Mongolia far more than the economy and population of the US dwarfs Mexico.
It seems impossible to think that Mexico could conquer the US, but far more implausible things have happened in past history.
Strange tangent, but Mexico doesn't even have a top 30 military strength. The U.S. can project power to every corner of the globe. It not only outnumbers Mexico but it has a number of technological, geographical, financial, logistical advantages that Mexico is nowhere near competing with. In the distant past nations didn't even necessarily understand the full capacity of their competition. In modern warfare, we know our enemies capabilities and they know our capabilities, satellites leave little to the imagination.
Japan leapfrogged China by industrializing quicker than they did. Industrialization is an obvious force multiplier for an economy and military.
And? You don't need to win big set piece battles to win a war. Insurgencies have won over and over again because without the support of the local people, the occupying forces must continuously expend massive amounts of capital along with some of their own lives to maintain control. The people are what makes an area either valuable or expensive.
> How the unique aspects of America basically make it impossible for the the country to be in the position China was in during the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is to say, a total disaster, beset by civil wars, colonial acquisitions, invasions, on and on.
The US literally had a civil war in the 19th century. And judging by the current polarized political sentiments, I wouldn't be surprised if another one happened in my lifetime. But yes, I don't think anyone will be invading the US any time soon.
> More broadly, how the cultural dynamics of the West led to the Reformation, Wars of Religion, Renaissance, and Industrial Revolution and to the West being the dominant power in the first place.
Prior to the Renaissance, the West languished for centuries in the dark ages and middle ages whereas China prospered during the Tang and Song Dynasty. So it clearly isn't something that's uniquely about, say, Christianity or chivalrous knights, that allowed the West to develop so well. Cycles of dominance like the Islamic Golden Age and stuff seem to be mostly driven by institutions and luck rather than fixed cultural traits. Probably what got the West to become the dominant power and industrialize was the development of scientific thinking, which translated to advantages in every respect such as ship navigation and making cannons, which then led to colonialism and extracting resources from every part of the world. But now everyone has scientific thinking, and if anything, China is embracing science a lot more while America is regressing back into superstitions (for example, the current United States Secretary of Health and Human Services is a conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist).
Also, you allude to Japan's stagnation after the 1980s, but I think that's largely due to policy, demographics, and external factors.
Having been to both China and the American midwest (and living in a red state) China is WAY more superstitious. The US stuff is purely reactionary, not the bubbling up of some strong longly held cultural beliefs.
The American Civil War was nothing like the Chinese civil wars of the 19th and 20th centuries. America industrialized almost directly as a consequence of the war, and in some sense it was an economic war of the industrial north conquering the agrarian south. Really not comparable to the chaotic situation that happened in China, with warlords, foreign interventions, etc.
And scientific thinking is very much a consequence of cultural trends in Europe, many of which were explicitly religious in nature.
> Also, you allude to Japan's stagnation after the 1980s, but I think that's largely due to policy, demographics, and external factors.
China has the same demographic problem that Japan has. It has a declining population and a lopsided population pyramid, made particularly stark by the implementation of one child policy many decades ago.
I don't understand this single dimensional view of the world where one country has to be the "winner" or "best". Historically that has almost never been the case except for military might, which wasn't necessarily correlated with technological advancement. Economic size does matter, but that's eventually going to track population size.
Why can't we have a multi polar world where different countries are good at different things, and no one has to dominate?
Because at the international stage there's no rule. It's pure anarchy. This is why the countries with big military might and and economy to back it can bully the other countries into submission, or bribe them into submission (post-WW2 US and USSR did both). With this they can boost their economy, and with that their military so there's a superpower born. This is super stupid of course. What you describe requires rationality and humility. So far not happening.
Its not about dominating its the constant competition. Growth and power makes it easier to grow more and become more powerful. If you stay in your lane you limit how you can grow and then the guy who didnt stay in their lane has grown bigger and can now influence and push you around.
You could have an equal balance of power but both sides would still be competing to match each other and it could be upset at any moment.
Agreed. And don't get me started on the whole Thucydides Trap, whose primary trap is that assuming war is inevitable based on conflicts from centuries ago will, in fact, become a stupidly self-fulfilling prophecy.
Readit News
The fast pace of economic growth didn't necessarily come from authoritarianism (though I'll accept it helped in some ways) but from the fast catch-up. That isn't going to last forever. Growth will slow - it's slowing already. And when it does, a generation of people (who grew up wealthy) will start to think about corruption, human rights, and having a say in what goes on.
My thesis is something like "any authoritarian can sail a ship in calm seas". The government of China's hard times are ahead of it. It's too early to write an epitaph for democracy.
That does not seem to be the case anymore under Xi.
And the large fleet of troop transport ships china is actively building is to spread that democracy to neighoring countries
Same with supporting russian invasian in Ukraine
"any democratic gov can sail a ship in calm sea"
As we see in europe and the usa, when democracy lasts too long, people get too relaxed and free and turn unhappy with random things that annoy them. They used to be at work too much to worry about them, but now they can stare at their neighbour and wonder why this 'migrant' has more than them etc. Or whatever happens to annoy them. And consequently start voting for ultimately authoritarian 'leaders', which will make everything worse for them and most others.
They are less relaxed because power over time concentrated so much that the top is managing to kill the middle class and generally squeeze everyone. The same top is running huge marketing campaigns of blaming everything but them and as solution they offer authoritarianism and even more power concentration.
The public is too busy working to be able to analyze the issue correctly. Plus political education has disappeared from schools and has been methodologically deleted by the top.
Deleted Comment
Instead of framing it as “why does this migrant have more than others”, maybe it’s worth looking at the real issue: why is my job being outsourced to someone overseas?
Democracy took away that person's job and now those voters want someone authoritarian who will bring it back.
Unsurprisingly, when you have authoritarianism that’s at least mildly supported by the citizens, you can do wonders with 1.4B people. At some point, we have to give them credit where it’s due.
China had double digit gdp growth in 2000s, high single digit in 2010s, and still decent single digit in 2020s - that is until a year or so ago. These are the calm seas that used to be but are no longer.
Geo politically China has and will always be squeezed, just by their geographic location. But economically they were flying ahead in the last few decades, and everything is so much easier while you have strong economic growth. Growth that they are struggling to realize suddenly... this will be a huge change and challenge for internal politics in China going forward.
Because when people are getting wealthier each year then they are happy. But as soon as that stops, then it's like when the music stops and people have to find the first available chair to sit on. Those that don't find one will be unhappy.
No matter how rocky the world is the seas are calm when everyone has in close memory how it used to be.
This growth has stopped recently...
Maybe. But what happens when that group of people are suppressed and it takes a lot longer for them to become brave and speak up? Meanwhile, the government of China will become more powerful and be more of a hegemonic power than America ever was. That may extend their ability to govern and remain authoritarian. Not just for their citizens, but against other regions they unfortunately control like Hong Kong or Taiwan or Tibet or Xinjiang.
And all that's before counting whatever Trump manages to ruin before his time is up.
This applies to neither Russia nor China. Especially not China – authoritarian China if the 50s-70s was a complete clusterfuck every which way, in no small part due to Mao's staggering incompetence. A key part of Xiaoping's reforms of the 80s – which lifted hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty – was renouncing some of Mao's more mad notions.
There are plenty of other examples where authoritarians screwed over their countries quite badly, from Mugabe to Suharto to Maduro. To say nothing of people like Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, and similar jolly fellows who outright murdered their own people by the millions.
In authoritarian regimes you have no meaningful pushback. When Putin says "we're going to invade Ukraine real quick, stoke me a kipper, back before supper" then no one is going to say "you idiot, that's fucking mental" because you risk brutally accidentally falling out of the window while taking a shower. And now Russia is "stuck" in this pointless war because Putin has painted himself in a corner, and there is not going to be a peaceful change of governance in Russia, after which a new administration can change course.
In addition authoritarians are free to be as corrupt as they like of course. Who is going to hold them to account?
In the short term an authoritarian can do the right thing (Xiaoping is an example), but in the long term it never works out because sooner or later an idiot and/or asshole will plant their arsecheeks on the throne, after which you're fucked.
Seems like this can happen in a democracy just the same.
Who cares if it's the largest economy? What matters is productivity per person, which is around what Thailand produces - $13,000 USD per capita.
One question I love asking is the pro-China faction is - assuming China grows at 5% per year (it's no longer growing at 7-8%), how long would it take to catch up to the US on a GDP per capita basis with the US growing an anemic 2%?
What people forget is the US growing at 2% is equivalent to to China growing at 12% (since per capita GDP is 6x).
China needs to stop their slowing economy all in an environment of reduced global trade and a terrible demographic shift.
But besides GDP per capita, I think your criticism of GDP PPP per capita is wrong. You can live a very decent life in China. In some ways, it’s superior to Americans for many Chinese people. You just have to go to China to see it for yourself.
It's not just China. A big part of why Putin in Russia has managed to hold onto power for so long was that Russia's recovery from the collapse of USSR was happening during his first two presidential terms. Even though very little of that recovery could be attributed to Putin's policies.
The same holds for democracy too. Good economy makes for content population. But if your country's economy is going to shit, that doesn't bode well for whatever party that happens to be in charge - and might even open the doors for an authoritarian takeover.
Fantasy history there. No, the actual timeline: USA determined that USSR-CPC split and animosity were real and should be exploited. China, a social and economic basketcase, also saw the benefit of pivoting to the West.
Then (fortuitously for the Chinese ..) Mao died and Deng Xiaping came to power and then to the US and wore a cowboy hat! Western Capitalists* , whether due to their cupidity (or stupidity), convinced themselves that massive investment, funds, and technology transfer to Communist China would somehow engender a "liberal China" in a generation.
Even after CPC crushed the "liberal" front in its cadre in 1989, which should have been a wakeup call to the idiot class that rules the West, we had 8 years of Slick Willy letting China get their hands on all sorts of tech and secret in US and the West.
And now, the Orange Clown is finishing "the job" by laying waste to US aliances and institutions, making sure 21st is irrevocably the Chinese Century.
So that, hn, is how China actually got to "eat the world".
https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/1kp4mxw/deng_x...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...
*: No that ain't you and that certainty ain't me and it's not even the fabled "10%". Try the 0.1%.
I’m going to concur with others here. It’s not irrecoverable. And the future isn’t yet written.
China has had the fortune (even eclipsing the US) of being a giant market of burgeoning consumers and massive amount of labor. The US first won this economic opportunity partially through immigration and a well-timed WW2 victory. Now its chinas turn to wield consumerism.
That said, China also has the misfortune of a serious risk for population collapse due, in part, to the prior 1 child policy. They’re aging faster than the US and others nations, and that will dramatically shift their economic output, consumption, and of course strain government resources. They also don’t have a culture of immigration like the US to slow the change. It would take a major global shift to see large immigration into China. There are other major economic risks they face, like their real estate debt, but the population collapse does pose a significant threat to stunt or reverse their ascendance.
TLDR: China could be the next Japan, not the next US.
What Trump did so far is a farce but it's recoverable.
History is too unpredictable to determine which nation is the winner of the 21st century. Anybody who claims to know the future have too much certainty about the course of history.
Channel 4 news made an interview with a financial times journalist if you wanna hear a neat summary https://youtu.be/43PtL0XQeA8?si=bovF8wXeK9Ege4Mz
But it's not exclusive to this video, lots of coverage around, from way bigger channels too.
e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAj9zB4vaZc
- China had a free look at what Japan did so well 70s-90s
- China had a free look at Russia and most definitely did not repeat their mistakes economically. Russia ought to be the most embarrassed of all how well done China has done.
- the above two points are compliments to china: they take statecraft far smarter abd seriously for them. Similarly, China isn't stupid enough to start a war (Ukraine) they couldn't mop up with a low level adversary. But Russia is because they're fragile that way.
- China under Nixon sided with the US and the west, who had solid currency to pay for goods. That helped a lot.
- we Americans made the same mistake germany did with Russian energy: economic ties are not a by way to western liberlization. You can't buy off Russia from invading.
- and as for us Americans: we didn't protect ourselves in job losses through nafta, or China. It wasn't woke liberal politicians who sent jobs overseas or to canada/Mexico or china. It was private corporate owners/boards. And yes, they are a special kind of stupid if they couldn't see the long game china played. China had a long game; US only saw $ signs. Good lord! China was never going to allow dominance in manufacturing or access to Chinese markets by outsiders. The British made sure of that. Period.
- the US is now at a point where job security is more important than cheap crap at 5 and below, while china has moved onto high end. The days of trading lower consumer prices for job losses is waning.
A good shortcut is to just invent and use new words. USSR-PRC is probably better than arguing over CPC or CCP, which itself probably comes from the Russian CCCP as the Alaska Trump-Putin meeting made me notice.
As per Google: CCCP is the Cyrillic form of the Russian acronym СССР, which stands for Союз Советских Социалистических Республик (Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik).
Other things that may be beneficial to do: not anthropomorphizing countries and using the neuter "it", saying "X government" like USG instead of "Washington DC." Using stand-ins like Washington DC for US Government another word is called metonymy.
And China is no longer just catching up in many industries, it is leading innovation[1]. Many in China believe they are simply returning to their natural state being the world’s number one economy.
Your analysis is through the lens of Western culture. The definition and understanding of freedom and harmony are entirely different in China. I was in China and experienced this myself, so this is firsthand experience, not something I picked up from blogs or news. And China is not like Russia at all, Russia fills its government with oligarchs, while China fills it with science and technology experts[2]
> And when it does, a generation of people (who grew up wealthy) will start to think about corruption, human rights, and having a say in what goes on.
In the Chinese context, freedom is defined collectively (freedom from chaos, poverty, or foreign domination etc), whereas here in the West it's individual liberty. Harmony and social stability are seen as more valuable than political pluralism, so authoritarian governance is culturally framed as legitimate. Chinese leaders and citizens remember periods of fragmentation and civil war (warlord era, Japanese invasion, cultural revolution). There is a widespread belief that adopting a Western adversarial political model could reintroduce instability and weaken national unity so something China cannot risk given its size and diversity.
That is the main reason this will not happen, you will not see a liberal style democracy in China. This claim is repeated all the time, but it is a total misunderstanding of their culture, ethnicity, and history. China has a long history of centralized, bureaucratic governance (over 2k years since the Qin Dynasty), where stability and order are prioritized.
1. https://itif.org/publications/2024/09/16/china-is-rapidly-be...
2. https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/chinas-xi-stacks-government...
The US for example doesn't take care of it's people. They do the absolute bare minimum in the name of illusionary "freedom". The only people who are free are the rich.
Call it whatever you want.. but there is great benefit in having a government who recognizes that society comes first- not the individual.
Either these people will migrate abroad and improve their host countries, or their home countries will grow a brain and beg them to stay behind with carrots. Lots of carrots. Like China.
Communism does not take off in stable prosperous societies because there isn't a market for it. It quite literally requires an underclass of people unhappy enough to stake their lives on establishing a different social order.
Western especially the US has long been the release valve for CCP to manage dissidents and alike, and it’s been quite effective, countless young souls looking for freedom was assimilated and became faceless in the capitalism machinery abroad, instead of fighting for their future in China.
The self enshitification of USA will slowly but surely close that loophole CCP has been enjoying, and force more young Chinese to make China a better place for themselves as they will have no other choices.
You're right. The fast pace of growth came from the policies that encourage ruthless capitalism. You can see that Chinese government controls business like oil and tobacco, but it gives tons of freedom for business owners to run wild.
This claim is provably incorrect.
> Analysis of all 37.5 million registered firms in China reveals that 65% of the largest 1,000 private owners have direct equity ties with state owners […] The number of private owners with direct equity ties with the state almost tripled between 2000 and 2019, and those with indirect equity ties rose 50-fold.
> Provincial and local government officials in China enforce laws and control resources, such as land and loans, but these officials change positions every few years. […] Publicly listed firms increase perk spending (travel, dining, and entertainment) by an average of 3.6 million yuan (20%) when new local officials take charge. […] The results are consistent with the view that local officials are important gatekeepers and firms seek to influence them with perks and positions of power within SOEs.[1][2]
> China’s domestic politics have changed significantly over the past decade, with the top leadership enacting much more muscular policies to limit the power of large corporations while also deploying extensive measures to support firms, especially in key industries. According to Hsieh, this trend means that companies need to navigate the state’s “two strong hands,” one supportive and the other restrictive which aim to increase the party’s control over the economy even as the private sector continues, in one form or another, to grow. Moreover, political control is likely proving oppressive for companies as the party-state increasingly weights national security over economic growth. […] These findings […] suggest that not all government intervention in the economy is welcome by Chinese companies, especially if it comes with national security strings attached. The findings from the experiment suggest that state and party influence on private firms may have evolved to prioritize politics above economic growth, creating new challenges for companies that would naturally seek to maximize political support alongside autonomy.[3]
[1] https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/rise-state-conne...
[2] https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/how-do-chinas-fi...
[3] https://bigdatachina.csis.org/unpacking-linkages-between-the...
China is spiralling right now, not tomorrow , today.
Dead Comment
Besides the ideological component here being embarrassingly incoherent (the bad was caused by "authoritarian power" in general; the good was caused by "a new authoritarian power" in particular) your facts are plain wrong. The low baseline was pre-Mao (and pre-Lenin) when famine, illiteracy, technological impoverishment, and labor immobility was the rule. Deng's opening up certainly was something, but it undoubtedly stood upon the shoulders of the Mao era. Even the WEF agrees: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/06/how-china-got-rich-4...
> But the “conventional wisdom” ignores the fact that — even inclusive of the serious mistakes, lost lives and lost years that some insist define the early decades after 1949 — the foundations laid during Mao’s rule, including land reform and redistribution, substantial investments in heavy industry, public health, literacy, electrification, and transportation gave China a substantial leg up. These developments positioned China for takeoff well ahead of the official inauguration of Reform and Opening in 1978. While Deng’s reforms catalyzed China’s economic takeoff, they built upon critical foundations established during Mao’s era, which are often overlooked.
Even the WEF is wrong, of course, because they do the usual thing of inflating the importance of GDP; GDP has virtually no applicability to a socialist economy and the "revitalization" you speak of was, as far as its quantitative measure, a magic trick. A literal capitalization upon decades of labor mobilization.
Wow, so we are on rewriting history now?
“Lenin” and his cronies caused a massive famines with their own hands.
Substantial percentage of population died of hunger on a very fertile soil without any natural disaster [0].
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%93...
> The tragedy isn’t that China is winning, it’s that the West stopped imagining better futures.
This one hits close to home. I saw an improvement in quality of life between the 90s and maybe 2005, but not so much since then. Not to say that there hasn't been progress, I mean tablets and pervasive internet & smartphone usage was unthinkable back then. But my life isn't any better for them. Cities feel worse, more congested, less money for public transport, more littering. Nature is disappearing all around me. Energy is WAY more expensive. Food quality is worse. Pollution seems worse. Hell, people seem worse, somehow?
Maybe this is all the disenchantment of middle age (or slumbering depression). But I haven't seen any political projects that fill me with joy in a very long time. Only dread. From shitty "free" trade agreements to Chat Control. Pouring more concrete and reducing train services. Endless austerity because we can no longer afford healthcare and/or pensions.
Yet at the same time, economic growth has mostly kept going, but it isn't translating to improved quality of life for Average Joe.
Either way, "no longer trying" is how I would describe the US leadership over the last 2 (or more!) decades.
Democracy can't work when people don't have a functioning 4th estate.
In the process lots of things have been captured by private companies that consolidated and got richer and more powerful than many countries.
Now we have a bunch of rent seekers who don't support our local economies, but pour profits through Bermuda-Luxembourg money funnels into their Scrooge McDuck vaults.
Yes ... money has diminishing returns on happiness. Americans often have a really hard time understanding and accepting this.
Ask your favorite frontier LLM what Americans should be doing to improve their quality of life, based on what we know works in other rich countries.
* Economic growth slowed down significantly under Xi Jinping compared to his predecessor Hu Jintao. Also, while Xi handled the start of the Covid pandemic well, he sort of fumbled the recovery afterwards with too heavy-handed quarantine/daily testing policies.
* China has demonstrated that it's super good at AI stuff, publishing lots of papers, having extremely talented engineers at Deepseek, etc, but after Deepseek stunned the world with the R1 model, subsequent models got heavily censored and languished in relative obscurity.
* China continues to have a brain drain of talented scientists and engineers to the US and other parts of the world. A large proportion of the top talent at Google, OpenAI, xAI, Meta, etc, are Chinese-American.
* From my anecdotal experience, many young people in China feel helpless and unmotivated due to the hyper-competitive environment and lack of opportunities. It is common to find healthy young adults who would rather "lie flat" than work. Together with an extremely aging population due to the one-child policy, this does not bode well for the future.
Anyway, I just wish China would just continue opening up, namely to get rid of the great firewall. In the age of information it is lame that information flow in and out of the country is so restricted. On one hand, as this article points out, the rest of the world is ignorant of the advances in China. On the other hand, the Chinese people are also ignorant of many things outside.
The wall always had two functions, the obvious blocking from getting people in, but it also blocks from getting your people out
I'm pretty sure this isn't what happened. DeepSeek just hasn't released a big model upate. But in the meantime, Qwen, Bytedance, Ziphu and Moonshot AI have released extremely impressive models, some of which are SOTA or close to it. The open source/open weight world is still in love with Chinese labs as they keep releasing cool stuff and filling the void left by Meta and Mistral.
What these Chinese models have that is interesting is that they are much cheaper to run and they are open source. This has pushed the other closed source SOTA models to make all the big updates we have seen the last few months. I guess we can thank these Chinese models for creating some competitive pressure, which has pushed the forefront, but they aren't doing so by leading the forefront.
To become the next Rome, China would have to open up and let itself be infected by the rest of the world. It's a rite of passage, with no guarantee that it will have the constitution to endure the culture shock and the subsequent fever. How do you expose 1.4 billion minds to new perspectives, while also keeping everyone paddling in the same direction?
There's too much focus on the chip production in the news, but the industry ecosystem is much bigger than that. Especially chip design and design automation are stagnated fields in the West because of the limited talent pool and lack of investment. You guys here are used to all the VC money, but in HW development world the story is different. There's simply a lack of investors to put down 10s of millions with 5-10 years horizon. Couple this with lack of talent: there aren't enough EE graduates with necessary training, you get a bleak situation. So most if the industry relies on foreigners from developing countries: Iran, China, India, Bangladesh.. Now that those Chinese EEs have better prospects at home, most of them are returning back to China to start their own companies.
Similar trend is happening in design automation tools. We have 3 monopolies in the West extracting 20-30 peecent of the revenue from the semicon companies. There are competitors showing up in China. They aren't on par yet but it's just SW, so it's a matter of time. Since there's competition their pricing is so much better too. Unfortunately we don't have access to these SW, but Chinese companies do.
Chinese companies used to open design offices in the West to keep connected to the talent here. In the last 6 months they're massively divesting. This means EEs in China will be valued even more. Add this to 80% of the research in the field happening in Chinese universities now (as opposed to less than 10% 20 years ago), they have everything nicely aligned.
My hopes for China fall into 2 main camps: - Measured increases in personal freedom. Restricting information serves to slow the viral spread of minority/non-mainstream opinions (i.e. limiting the reach of a vocal minority), but keeping the population from being exposed to "bad" information is only beneficial as long as the government is "good".
- Acknowledge/continue working on current issues (demographic issues, housing market, domestic consumption). The worst that can happen to a country is that they trick themselves with their own lies (a common trope in many films featuring non-Western countries).
Interested in hearing thoughts/rebuttals/additions on this.
Disclaimer: I am ethnically Chinese but grew up outside the country.
At the very least, democracy is a comprehensive strategy and multiple policies must in place simultaneously to approach the leading cases of success that we see in current times, such as decades of great education.
Regime change without bloodshed changes the incentives for rulers enough that it's worth them building anad preserving things rather than just extracting as much as possible for themselves and their families and supporters. There's the chance they can come back.
Because most Chinese people believe the latter is freedom while most Americans believe the former is freedom. Since most people on HN are Americans, freedom is defined as the former here.
> the ability to walk outside without ever having the chance of randomly shot dead
This is a good measure of risk perception, and you can even use it as one of the freedom scores. The problem is that it is hard to measure. For example, consider if this measure is based on a poll: if an act of terrorism occurs just before the poll is taken, the score will definitely drop. However, in countries where such news is heavily suppressed (e.g., the former USSR), the scores may appear perfect.
[1] https://freedomhouse.org/country/scores
[2] https://freedomhouse.org/reports/freedom-world/freedom-world...
If anything this should open our eyes that there are more paths in front of us to take than a simple dichotomy.
Unfortunately oversimplified, pre-digested informational slop is easy to convey and satisfying to ingest. Nuanced viewpoints take flak from both sides of people who have absorbed the former kind of information.
It is definitely interesting (annoying?) how it is often taken as a given that China is an enemy of the US rather than a competitor in the global scene with values both in common and in disagreement. Perhaps there is some colonial/empire-building projection going on, or the US wants to keep being the only country to meddle in other countries' politics.
That's surely an interesting take when their demographics are absolutely imploding, and their economy is rife with state sponsored excess funded by debt.
Say what you will about capital markets, but they do tend to deliver things that are actually desired and economically valuable given the right pricing incentives.
I've long argued that we should replace our income tax with a progressive but heavy carbon tax. This would be far more effective than federal greenhouse gas regs and incentive programs. Unfortunately they're politically dead on arrival because they would tax the rich, powerful and politically connected far more than your average joe.
“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” - Sun Tzu, The Art of War
I don't believe any of the stats coming out of China. I think it is best to approach data coming out of adversarial countries with lots of paranoia.
If anti-aging tech arrives in the next two decades, demographic will stop imploding, their and everyone else. It becomes a matter of execution.
I've long argued that we should replace our income tax with a progressive but heavy carbon tax. This would be far more effective than federal greenhouse gas regs and incentive programs. Unfortunately they're politically dead on arrival because they would tax the rich, powerful and politically connected far more than your average joe.
Piguovian taxes and LVT are good ideas if politically difficult to implement, yet I am cautiously optimistic. There had been news about accurate appraisal of land in Baltimore that made local media coverage.
Whereas the US is better with state sponsored VC funded debt ?
>but they do tend to deliver things that are actually desired and economically valuable given the right pricing incentives.
No, they don't. Any look at the market in the past 15 years will tell you that they don't, and that nothing major or of value has been produced by "the market". It's all propped on debt and infinite money printing.
The other shoe that is waiting to drop is the amount of spending and shadowy debts that to prop up the real estate industry. The vast majority of Chinese have invested their life savings into what looks like a mirage.
Thirdly, they've become the world's factory. But now now they've priced themselves out and it's moving to places like Vietnam and India. So now what's left? Consumer spending? High tech? It looks like they need to reinvent themselves again.
see https://www.businessinsider.com/japans-eighties-america-buyi...
and movies like Gung Ho, and Rising Sun, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_(film) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_(1993_film)
That is just unrealistic on a longer timescale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Wynn
https://overcast.fm/+AAN68WmR_iU/45:36
He also wrote a reasonable piece on the western mischaracterization and rewriting history of china‘s pandemic response
Deleted Comment
In any case, Tooze is a serious thinker who has written various things besides this line I paraphrased from a podcast. I recommend checking out his work.
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-401-the-dollar-sy...
Sure, China might rule over the ashes, but I wouldn't make large bets over what the world would look like when the tensions that have accumulated over the past 30 years explode catastrophically.
Not sure how the title matches with this line at all.
In any case, these kinds of analyses always seem really shallow and historically ignorant to me. I can totally buy the idea that China will become a dominant economic player in the world, if it isn't already. This seems like an obvious, borderline mundane observation to make.
What would be more insightful is an analysis of China and the West that factors in three big things:
1. How the unique aspects of America basically make it impossible for the the country to be in the position China was in during the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is to say, a total disaster, beset by civil wars, colonial acquisitions, invasions, on and on. No matter how much China outcompetes America, I don't think it will ever be in that sort of situation. The military and national security state, plus the sheer amount of personal firearms, pretty much guarantees IMO that the US is basically impregnable from outside military interventions. 19th century China had neither of these things. And so I think you're inevitably going to have, at worst, a multipolar world, if not a directly bipolar one.
2. More broadly, how the cultural dynamics of the West led to the Reformation, Wars of Religion, Renaissance, and Industrial Revolution and to the West being the dominant power in the first place. And more importantly, if those cultural trends are still active, even if they are somehow dormant. If you don't factor these in, your picture of history is extremely short-term and basically dependent on contemporary predictions of the future. (See: predictions of Japan in the 1980s.)
3. And more recently, how the "enemy" of the Soviet Union prompted the US to behave more competitively and feel pressured to perform. See, for example, the Space Race. I don't really get the sense that China is anywhere near occupying the same place in the American imagination right now, and so there isn't much of a competitive spirit. There seem to be rumblings of one developing in the last decade, but it's still not quite there. If it ever develops, certainly it's going to be a factor.
I find that a bit naive.
First, as for the point about firearms, I honestly don't think this is very relevant for the ability of a state to defend itself. Lots of firearms in civil possession might make life harder for domestic police - because they have (at least in theory) some obligation to protect the state's citizens and their property, even those citizens with firearms. So they cannot arbitrarily overpower those people.
An invading army has no such qualms. Just have a look at the wars that are currently going on, or the US' own invasions in the past. They have rockets, drones, airstrikes, artillery, tanks and all the other goodies at their disposal and will generally avoid getting anywhere near where your firearm could hit them. They won't try to arrest you, they'll simply blow up your house.
The second point has merit: The US not only has the most powerful national military in the world, it's also the leader of the most powerful international military alliance. Not to mention it is still at the center of the global trading and financial system, as well as the internet. Because of those factors, a chance of invasion is nil.
But that's nothing uniquely American, it just reflects the amount of power America currently has. Britain was in a similar position two centuries ago and Spain before that. It might change again.
> They won't try to arrest you, they'll simply blow up your house.
The point is, they'd have to blow up so many houses it's not viable.
Generals are always preparing to fight the previous war.. Look at China's actions (or the West's, for that matter). Rarely is it an invasion with guns and bombs (with the notable exception of the US Middle East policy). Mostly it's slow economic takeover. What good will guns do you, when to sell your wares, you need permission from a Chinese market owner [1], or when the only jobs are in Chinese-owned chains and conglomerates?
It won't be as bad, but it could be differently bad - for all the invasions China suffered, they are still today 91% ethnically Han-Chinese [2], in stark contrast to the dramatic demographic transformation of the US since 1965.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/chinas-jdco...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Ethnic_g...
Caveat I've been wrong on pretty much every political prognostication I've ever made, so buy some defense industry stocks.
Maybe US gets really good at maglev trains and in reprisal China goes full throttle on inventing teleportation/hyperdrive tech?
It seems impossible to think that Mexico could conquer the US, but far more implausible things have happened in past history.
Japan leapfrogged China by industrializing quicker than they did. Industrialization is an obvious force multiplier for an economy and military.
Or a large scale insurgency. Something millions of military veterans have (unfortunately) witnessed first hand.
One of us has not been watching the news lately.
The US literally had a civil war in the 19th century. And judging by the current polarized political sentiments, I wouldn't be surprised if another one happened in my lifetime. But yes, I don't think anyone will be invading the US any time soon.
> More broadly, how the cultural dynamics of the West led to the Reformation, Wars of Religion, Renaissance, and Industrial Revolution and to the West being the dominant power in the first place.
Prior to the Renaissance, the West languished for centuries in the dark ages and middle ages whereas China prospered during the Tang and Song Dynasty. So it clearly isn't something that's uniquely about, say, Christianity or chivalrous knights, that allowed the West to develop so well. Cycles of dominance like the Islamic Golden Age and stuff seem to be mostly driven by institutions and luck rather than fixed cultural traits. Probably what got the West to become the dominant power and industrialize was the development of scientific thinking, which translated to advantages in every respect such as ship navigation and making cannons, which then led to colonialism and extracting resources from every part of the world. But now everyone has scientific thinking, and if anything, China is embracing science a lot more while America is regressing back into superstitions (for example, the current United States Secretary of Health and Human Services is a conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist).
Also, you allude to Japan's stagnation after the 1980s, but I think that's largely due to policy, demographics, and external factors.
And scientific thinking is very much a consequence of cultural trends in Europe, many of which were explicitly religious in nature.
China has the same demographic problem that Japan has. It has a declining population and a lopsided population pyramid, made particularly stark by the implementation of one child policy many decades ago.
You could have an equal balance of power but both sides would still be competing to match each other and it could be upset at any moment.