China might be eating the world but the most obvious thing is the astroturfing.
And when I glance at pictures of cities in the US I see fascist armed goons terrorizing people and crumbling infrastructure
So why this particular comparison with a single country to you? Tokyo, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore exceeded Western cities decades ago. Even today, Shanghai or Shezhen only is developed in certain areas, it does not reach the high level of urban development on ALL areas like in Hong Kong or Tokyo. And the mopeds or metro bomb checks aren't endearing either. It feels some people were either living under a rock for the last two decades, or they do have an agenda to push.
If one is debating in to inform, should you not point out that greater perspective here?
Even more, like OP said, why now specifically with all these articles salivating China. What were you doing back in 2007 or 2012, that you were not making the same comparisons could be made to Tokyo or Hong Kong, that you would well understand years ago. But there clearly isn't such a barrage from back then, either fron Americabs or Japanese or Hong Kongers themselves.
The early 80s were similar, when Japanese economy was in every single headline and being compared to the USA’s. The difference is, this time China has already surpassed the states in most of meaningful statistics.
1. It's a massive PR campaigns. Things are actually _not_ that great in China, their numbers are completely fake, and it might collapse any time now.
But China manages to make people write the contrary.
Maybe they _are_ paying for all the Youtubers [1] [2] and journalists [3] who explain that US decisions in trade, science, energy, etc... are a huge gift to China.
This is not so impossible: that's basically what the Soviet Union tried to do until the 70s. Lots of people in the 60s were rooting for the USSR, hoping the West would copy them... Maybe the moon landing help deflate that bubble. And somehow, the shit hit the fan early enough, and demonstrably enough, that it all collapsed.
It does not have to be a conspiracy - maybe if you manage to publish cute numbers that tell a great story, people will repeat the story for you.
And we're so unfamiliar with China in the West, that we would not see through the BS.
2. You see it repeated a lot, because it's real. China is once again the dominant superpower in the world, they're ahead of us in every department and we will soon look like archaic peasants compared to them : basically the rest of the world history. It's just that we witness one of the small bumps where they were not at their best, and we assume it was "normal".
The problem is that China is building so much of the world that we rely on, I honestly can't think of good reasons to think 1 is true, and not 2.
Maybe Taiwan will be their Afghanistan ? (Sadly, it will only take us a couple years to know...)
That being said, I really wonder what's the way "out", if there is any, of dependency on China:
* just chill, accept that we'll never build anything ever, and buy chinese stuff ? * wait for demography [4] to become a real problem ? * rebuild a supply chain from the ground-up - curious where you start from. What's the first factory you rebuild ? * assume that it, too, shall pass, and that at some point China will make one of the blunders that authoritarianism allow ?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU8zYS43TRg&pp=0gcJCbIJAYcqI...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tNp2vsxEzk
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/world/asia/trump-science-...
[4] https://www.newsweek.com/china-faces-economic-blow-populatio...
I'm ready to say "China is the greatest superpower ever and so much better than my US" so we can move on from this type of article.
There are also Europeans who feel uncomfortable with the US having 1.5* Europe's GDP with less than half the population.
It's an extant truth and it'll become even more blatant as many Western countries struggle to do basic stuff like build out infrastructure.
But GDP is not the only thing that matters. I personally (as European) care also about how the average people lives and in that matter I prefer the European style if that implies some difference in GDP.
Also, worth mentioning EU has a lot of countries that grew a lot because there were so far behind (the ex-communist ones) which means it was playing "catch-up". There are advantages to not having lately a war on your territory (USA)...
GDP is projection of economy strength. If economy is weak, country will lose on competitive markets, and your lifestyle will become worse in the future.
Europe has been ahead of US on quality of life scores for decades, and has had lower gdp numbers the entire time.
The man who invented GDP argued vigorously that it's a synthetic economic metric, and it shouldn't be used as a goal or measure of well-being, yet we insist on it because it's one of the few measures where the US is handily winning.
GDP, while imperfect, is at least rooted in a quantitative value.
You've got health measures like life expectancy, infant / maternal mortality, disability adjusted life years, BMI, cortesol, blood pressure, suicide rates, etc. Economic ones like labor market participation, un[der]employment, poverty rates, gini coefficients. Societal ones like crime rates, trust levels, civic participation, environmental metric, public transit accessibility, international test scores, human rights, marriage and actual vs wanted fertility rates. The list goes on. There are countless measures, just few that economists genuinely value.
- there is strong correlation between index and EU countries GDP per capita: countries with high GDP are at the top, and countries with low GDP are at the bottom
- US index is higher than combined EU index, some EU countries with high GDP top US
> I prefer the European style if that implies some difference in GDP.
It's quaint to think that but compounding interest is a doozy. If your competitors are growing at 4% a year and you're growing at 1% a year, they will triple their economy over 30 years while your economy sees a meak 30% boost. At some point you'll find your economy an entire century behind in development. And you'll no longer even have power or influence over the decisions made at the grown ups table.
> The tragedy isn’t that China is winning, it’s that the West stopped imagining better futures.
Or as a question: Why can't we do that stuff?
Because over the past decades the interests that used to focus on growing the pie have pivoted to scooping up more of the pie (usually by getting government, or government adjacent entity, to pull some string).
Imagine the year is 1950/60/70/80 and you are a lobbyist for a construction product manufacture. What do you tell your paid off political to vote for? Stuff that lowers cost, creates more development, etc, of course. Because for every mil spent industry wide you know your employer nets $10, or whatever.
In 2025 you'd wine and dine a bunch of IBC jerks and insurance jerks and maybe even government jerks to get them to phrase things so that the industry is "incentivized" to use your employer's class of products, to the detriment of literally every participant in your sector for whom a different class of product would have otherwise been superior in their situation.
This sort of pivot to zero sum behavior has permeated damn near every class of economic activity, only in the most cutting edge spots of cutting edge sectors and the lowest margin, lowest sophistication, lowest security/moat sectors do you see anyone lift a goddamn finger to grow the pie.
So as a counterpoint, consider the former President of the Geographic Society of China arguing to that there was too much focus on impressing with speed and scale and too little big-picture thinking about door-to-door transport within cities, which would've benefited more from suburban light rail and buses https://www.pekingnology.com/p/china-massively-overbuilt-hig...
Communism works.
China is not a communist country in practical terms and hasn't been for 30+ years.
This isn't communism; this is a 'let's get shit done and not argue' mentality. Counterpoint: India is generally considered democratic and capitalist, has a similarly-sized population and a similarly-sized landmass, but has zero kilometres of proper high-speed rail.
NIMBYs basically use property rights to their logical end. FWIW California is trying to fight this with laws that remove the rights of NIMBYs and their worst behaviors.
There are also 'green belt' laws (which ban construction on land in a ring around many cities) and there are 'environmental impact' laws (which require you to check for things like rare species) and there are 'areas of outstanding natural beauty' and national parks (where it's a lot harder to build things) and local government 'planning permission' rules (which have pretty broad powers to block development and dictate what type of development is allowed) and rules for 'nationally significant infrastructure projects' (giving national government a big say on things like airports) and also 'judicial review' for decisions that don't go your way.
And almost all of these still apply, even if the government themselves are performing the construction.
In the UK, just because you own some land, doesn't mean you're allowed to build on it.
You are falling for hype metrics on a flashy MVP and filling in claims that were never made with fanciful imagination. Pushing code straight into production works great until it doesn't.
They show the US narrowly holding Taiwan at the cost of dozens of ship, hundreds of planes and the depletion of missile stockpiles that have lead times measured in months to years.
China dominates the shipbuilding industry[1] and can easily rebuild whatever ships they lose while the US will be dependent on South Korea and Japan to rebuild whatever they lose.
At the same time China is stockpiling commodities[2] and has come to dominate the solar and battery manufacturing industry[3] by building a tightly integrated and automated supply chain which will greatly reduce their dependency on imported hydrocarbons should war break out.
America can't even muster up enough artillery shells to fight a proxy war with Russia right now and is in complete and utter disarray politically.
You should be paying attention to these kinds of articles instead of dismissing them. The next few years are not going to be very kind to America.
[0] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites...
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-s...
[2] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/07/23/w...
[3] https://apnews.com/article/china-climate-solar-wind-carbon-e...
US builds military ships themself. Also, this will be very asymmetrical war: missiles which can destroy ship costs XM vs XXXM for military ship cost.
Not recently...
https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites...
The key takeaway is that the United States does not have the stockpiles of munitions necessary to engage in a long-term conflict with China nor does it have the industrial capacity to scale up production in a timely fashion.
Additionally, American shipbuilding capacity has completely atrophied both from a decline of infrastructure and even worse a startling decline in blue-collar institutional knowledge. It has become so dire that the US Navy is looking to outsource ship production to South Korea.
It should be obvious at this point that China dominates in mass-production and they'll absolutely be able to out-produce the US in both ships and missiles in a long term conflict.
I think this is missleading conclusion, my reading of the link is that it says that in 4 week of active phase, US stockpile will deplete, it doesn't assess what damage China will receive, will it have enough ships/airplanes after US activated thousands of munitions, and will it rebuild them faster than US will restock missiles inventory (99% not).
> US Navy is looking to outsource ship production to South Korea.
could you provide citation?
Russia was supposed to be the 2nd military power in the world, and they couldn't do in 3 years what they thought they'd do in 3 days. A much smaller country, with a much smaller army, with surplus 90s western tech (at least in the first year) held against them. They didn't get air superiority at any point. Their navy was taken out of the warzone by a country with no navy of their own! And so on, and so forth.
China being a military superpower isn't credible. It sure wants to be seen as one, but an army is more than numbers on a pps presentation. They build tons of ships but do they have trained people to man them? (recent incident with PH coast guard making the cn navy have a kiss should be a hint)
Total displacement is meaningless when you put in conscripted, untrained people, no matter how motivated and patriotic they are (and I don't doubt they'd be).
Or their rockets that were found to have subpar prop mixtures. Or.. or.. or...
---
I say this as an european: the US isn't the best because they have big number goes up in military power. They do, of course, but it's much more than that. They have been actively involved in a conflict since the 2nd ww, with only a few years breaks. They have good training, practice in real world scenarios, and more importantly practice and are actively working with lots of allied forces.
Militarily, desert storm, iraq, syria and all the other coalition actions were "done" in 3 days. With air supremacy in 24 hours, usually. Watching the reports on how those operations unfolded always seems like a game of starcraft with cheating AI. You build turrets and cannons in your base, and the enemy brings stealth banshees and blink stalkers. It's not fair.
Meanwhile China has risen to become the dominant industrial superpower. So I don't even care much what China's military looks like at the moment. If they see fit to switch to a wartime economy, they will, and woe be the nation that thought it would be a good idea to pick a fight with them.
China's navy isn't the only one that has accidents.[0][1][2][3] and the kind of corruption that lead to their rockets having improperly mixed propellant also isn't unique to the Chinese navy either.[4][5]
You're absolutely right to question the quality of new recruits or conscripts in the armed forces and again China isn't the only one to have these kinds of problems.[6] After wasting trillions on losing two pointless wars the general public opinion of the US armed forces is in the dumpster and I'm skeptical that morale and enlistment will see a boost if the US goes to war with China over Taiwan.
Should a conflict with the US and China escalate you will see an unprecedented level of cyberattacks and fifth column attacks on the US due to the ubiquitous presence of Chinese technology in America and Chinese immigrants, some of whom will undoubtedly play the role of spies and saboteurs.
The US can have all the fancy stealth planes they want but it doesn't mean anything if they don't have enough missiles to arm them or the infrastructure to build missiles because they spent the last 25 years air conditioning tents in the middle east[7] and their electrical grid has just been sabotaged.
[0] https://www.foxnews.com/us/uss-harry-s-truman-ship-collision...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Fitzgerald_and_MV_ACX_Crys...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Bonhomme_Richard_(LHD-6)#J...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_John_S._McCain_and_Alnic_M...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal
[5] https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/retired-us-navy-admiral-f...
[6] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/09/28/new-pentagon-...
[7] https://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/137414737/among-the-costs-of-...
By what measure? All the declared objectives - "denazification" (the destruction of Ukraine's sovereignty), "demilitarization" (the destruction of Ukraine's armed forces), "protection of ethnic Russians" (now dying under Russian missile attacks), and so on - have obviously failed. The frontline has been static for years, while Russian losses are at record highs. Despite hundreds of thousands of dead and nearly a million wounded since 2022, Russia has not managed to capture even a single one of Ukraine's 22 regional capitals. Is this how victory is supposed to look like?
As noted, the result of the wargames was that China lost. That's not really the sort of result that the CCP would be looking for. They want stability. Losing a war, and a whole a bunch of young men, in a patrilineal society demographically warped by the CCPs one child policies ain't a recipe for stability.
China hasn't fought a war since '79. They probably shouldn't start learning how to fight again by trying an amphibious assault on an island that is mostly mountains, jungles, and cities. The US in '45 had more material advantages than the PRC ever will, and a lot of experience with amphibious assault, and they turned away from invading Taiwan to go to the incredibly costly invasions of the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, because as bad as that was, it was so much less difficult.
Note further that the wargames assumes that the fight is only between the US forces in theater vs a massed Chinese attack, because all the rest of the US military is dealing with "some other crisis".
America doesn't have great supply chains for building artillery shells, because they aren't important for our strategic focus China, and they weren't needed in quantity for our last military conflict, which was evidently about spending trillions of dollars ensuring that Afghanistan could have a woman's soccer team for a few years.
Just because the US can be more thoughtfully prepared doesn't that China is some unstoppable giant.
China simply has a population around 4x larger than America's, so even at a much lower level of development/standard of living it can still have a very big impact on the overall global economy.
China has a lot of problems, like a lot. But comparable QoL isn’t there. I’d say insane competition and work hours is probably the biggest problem for average person, from what I’ve heard from my friends, and browsing Chinese media.
Brown University's Costs of War project estimated that by 2021, all post-9/11 wars had cost $8T. When you factor in inflation since then, it easily exceeds $10T spent murdering farmers making $2/day in the Middle East. With nothing to show for it.
That's roughly a third of America's GDP/current debt wasted on making the world a measurably worse place.
Meanwhile, US development strategy post-WW has been 100% based on projecting military [1], political [2] and economic [3] power on a global scale.
So war isn't just "spending", but trading off investment on your own country vs. extracting value from somewhere else. That's how you get large defense funding but not public health care.
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-every-known-u-s-mili...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
I would be cautious applying broad statements and simple causes. Often we take these opportunities to connect it with whatever pet issue we individually care about. That's why you can see people blaming everything from zoning policies to DEI.
You'd be surprised by how much the rest of the world does not care about these things at all or even finds their presence degrading
More countries need to take a tip from Bermuda.
So it's not bland, because what is the weight of a single culture to the combined contributions of a dozen. And through that, possibility is created, resulting in a far greater range of diversity than the traditions stuck in the past.
I don't think of China as producing cheap crap, I think of it as producing everything. A lot of that stuff is cheap crap, I know because I bought it. But clearly they also produce high tech and high value goods.
I also don't think it's surprising or new that an authoritarian country can deliver material progress for its people. I think the same was true for the early Soviet Union and the fascist countries of 20th century Europe. Democracy's main selling point was never that it made us rich.
I don't know how old the capitalism/democracy conflation is, but it's definitely more than a few decades. The political and economic systems are inextricably linked in the minds of many.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
One of us has not been watching the news lately.
Or a large scale insurgency. Something millions of military veterans have (unfortunately) witnessed first hand.
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.
The author got one city in this list backward. China copied Singapore, through and through. Deng Xiaoping's state visit to Singapore was the catalyst and model for China's subsequent opening up and 'state capitalism'[1][2][3], where the party in power would have leverage and possibly ownership over both state- and privately-owned enterprises.
Singapore calls them 'GLCs', or government-linked companies, and they form the overwhelming majority of its GDP.
[1]: https://www.nlb.gov.sg/main/article-detail?cmsuuid=6c7cb559-... [2]: https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/s... [3]: https://thediplomat.com/2023/12/looking-back-on-deng-xiaopin...
You're phrasing make it sound like they aren't the largest coal consumer in the world. If they managed to genuinely leapfrog the west their manufacturing industry would be mostly electric. They are using the same unsustainable tech as the rest of us.
The same global pressures that affect every country will hollow out their supply and talent pyramids and there is no way around that short of just saying NO to slave labor
This is such an America centric point of view. Plenty of central Europe is delivering longer life expectancy and better public infrastructure, without the authoritarian state (at least if you ask anybody but an American).
Meanwhile plenty of European countries have seen declines in life expectancy in recent years:
Austria and Finland: Largest declines (-0.4 years each). Estonia and the Netherlands: -0.2 years. Germany, Italy, and Latvia: -0.1 years
What? New Orlean's French Quarter doesn't have McDonalds or Starbucks, either. And how is it shocking that a historical district in a province not internationally well known would have mostly domestic tourists?
> 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.
Is this person completely ignorant about Chinese history? Precisely nothing has changed about China, the culture has always been like this, if only because they've always been so large. There's a reason they've always called themselves the Middle Kingdom (i.e. the center of the universe). Large countries are like this, generally. The USA is like this. Perhaps the author is American and that's why they're so shocked when they begin to see the world through others' eyes.
I think the anti-colonial movement, like the social justice movement, gives a false impression to people about what it's like to be an "other". These movements bifurcate groups into oppressors and oppressed, and explicitly or implicitly the oppressed are cast as victims beholden to a world in which they have no agency, perennially always outside looking in. They're less than human; their humanity stripped in exchange for being cast as objects of virtue. It turns people into caricatures, so when you see "oppressed" people behaving normally--the same way "normal" people do, e.g. your local community--it can be shocking.
Yeah, I'm a bit perplexed by this. You'll see local brands and local tourism dominate in many parts of countries like Spain or Thailand or Peru which don't even pretend to be self sufficient. No real surprise that US brands are a footnote somewhere with a different culture, especially when there's a billion people there and they make a lot of the stuff the West uses anyway.
Perhaps a more apt comparison is that China-based Luckin Coffee has far more locations in the country compared to Starbucks.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/12/china-us-br...
Also: >prosperity without freedom, development without democracy, safety without expansive civil liberties.
So did the USSR in many places.
The reason China's total GDP is high is because the population is so high, over a billion people. That's something the Chinese government deserves zero credit for because without the one child policy the population would be even higher; the Chinese government actively tried to suppress population growth.
As another point of reference, Taiwan's GDP per capita is around $34k. I.e. if you look past the propaganda, in empirical terms the average Taiwanese person's material quality of life is twice as good as the average mainlander's.
This is contrary to the ideology of the cold war that the market economy of the West won because of western liberties - freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, free elections. China's incredible transformation is happening without those things.
There's nothing incredible about a GDP per capita of $15k, less than half the GDP of Korea, Japan or Taiwan. Slightly less even than places like Romania and Turkey. The only thing impressive about it that China's population is so large that the absolute GDP can be high even when the GDP per person is low. But the purpose of a government/economic system is to improve the standard of living of its citizens, and by that metric China is far behind other East Asian nations.
the ai had older data but it proves the point: "While the average disposable income for urban residents in 2019 was approximately 39,244 CNY (roughly $5,800 USD), rural residents earned significantly less at 14,389 CNY (roughly $2,100 USD)"
* 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
As China develops and becomes richer eventually the idea of moving from Shanghai to New York no longer looks as attractive.
1) https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/china-is-banning-eroti...
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.
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?
I don’t know much about China, but I’m not sure the Chinese model of economic modernization today is much different than post-war US model that worked of defense-led capitalism, strategic resource stockpiles to maintain price stability, and strong antitrust. I think the Chinese economy is probably more free-market (in the sense that it is easier to start a business, and the Econ 101 model of pure competition that drives down prices applies to more markets) than the US is today.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68844731
https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2025/02/the-relationship...
https://www.hudson.org/technology/china-ignores-rule-of-law-...
I'm no CCP shill, but I wish we'd do that too.
No China website spews stupid GDPR popups. They don't listen to the EU, even if they have EU users. I don't think the US should, either.
I don't disagree with privacy laws, but GDPR popups isn't it, and the US should grow its own. Don't set precedents that other countries can just make up laws and you'll just blindly follow them outside their jurisdiction.
The evidence being that the country that ignored those incentives grew faster than us.
government debt is 83% of GDP vs 123% for US as per: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/GG_DEBT_GDP@GDD/CHN/...
> they ignore international patents and intellectual property
so what? They got what they want and won multiple markets without major consequences.
- 300% is one measure of PRC aggregate debt that PRC collapsers want to compare with US government debt, ~120%. US aggregate debt is like 700-800%.
- The cities are generally fine, the recent retarded 1/2 local gov "sinking" / revenue chart being passed around based on Shih/Elkobi study using none standard metrics. The chart itself collated by retard who doesn't know PRC cities receive lots of central gov funding (~60%), so structurally local gov can spend more % of local revenue paying off debt. Seems like they're 100% debt servicing when it's minority share. Or else you know... all the those cities would have collapsed from no service. Also PRC also does try to pay off debt when it's prudent i.e. the principle, instead of rolling YoY forever. Hence they still have much better borrowing rates. Yes LGFVs and some shadow debts get roll overs, but PRC also does structural deleveraging to actually pay off debt - why local gov debt repayment is high last few years.
TLDR, think of PRC as household with ~1/2 the total debt as US, meanwhile PRC tries pays off principle and interest. US just largely services interest, but reserve currency allows a lot of stupid spending until spending catches up. I Why debt is fucking crazy in the states, is a political concern, except at the same time politicians can play fuckarounditis like it doesn't matter. A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking bout real money. Maybe.
I know this is a tangent but I really think it's completely asinine that we hold passenger rail and particularly high-speed rail to the same standards (environmental, eminent domain, etc) as other projects — public and private — in light of the fundamental differences:
- RoW for trains is highly constrained. Turns and hills are both very bad. A factory can be moved. A road can turn. A train is SOL.
- Passenger rail displaces transport modes that have far worse externalities for the environment, human safety and land use. Other infrastructure generally does not do this. There are a few exceptions like powerlines.
- Failing transport networks are a national embarrassment. If we have to do this — if we're committed to Cold War Two — then can't we at least win?
It's not just China that built more miles of passenger rail than the United States in the past two decades. It's also Mexico. Something is wrong.
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.
If anything this should open our eyes that there are more paths in front of us to take than a simple dichotomy.
Did anyone else see the picture and immediately think that this design wouldn't be possible in the west because it didn't have any anti-homeless barriers on it?
These benches are quite common in southern Europe (Croatia). https://total-croatia-news.com/news/made-in-croatia/more-cro...
Every time an article like this hits, the Western brain spasms.
But…but they don’t innovate, they just copy!
But…but ghost cities, Evergrande, debt spiral. Any day now it all collapses!
But…but how do they even freedom?
We can't believe China is eating the world because it would mean Western Civilization is contingent - that everything leading up to this point wasn't an inevitability. That we actually had a choice and got tricked into strip malls, failed governance, and life long debt. That wealth inequality wasn't actually our destiny and the people who got rich off what we built didn't actually deserve it.
So we have to believe that people may ride those trains and pay with those QR codes, but deep down, their souls are yearning for suburban strip malls, CNN panel discussions, and 30-year mortgages.
China has to be perpetually both failing and knocking at our doorstep because the idea that then we’re left with the intolerable truth: they actually built things that work, and we chose not to.
You're joking right? Like Japan has been a central part of American culture since at least the 80s. I grew up on Nintendo, Mario is more famous than Mickey Mouse at this point. Everyone had Sony Walkmans long before social media came out. Toyota and Honda won the passenger car market many decades ago. There's always in my lifetime been a huge constituency of Japan fans in the U.S., praising everything from anime to sushi to video games to Tokyo markets.
Japan is getting a huge influx of tourism from the west right now because their economy has been on a 3 decade slog after rapid growth from the 50s through the 90s. Their population is in decline and their currency has gotten very weak. Thus, it's cheaper for westerners to visit than it has been in the past.
Respecting people and their culture versus enjoying instant ramen are not the same thing.
Flying abroad for vacations has gotten cheaper and more popular over the decades. That's the only reason.
This trend is seen everywhere, Americans are doing more tourism everywhere than ever before:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/214774/number-of-outboun...
> ordinary people still think it is just a smog filled industrial dump
China regularly has the most polluted air quality in the world, and the water is undrinkable due to heavy metals and chemicals. Both are observable and well documented. Not to mention the crumbling infrastructure, the flooding, the extremely low trust society...
Japan and China could not be any more different.
Mobile payments vs credit card payments aren't a revolution. America has Google and Apple Pay but most Americans still swipe. It's just not that different and it's easier to compartmentalize your spending that way.
The idea of an "everything app" like WeChat actually turns me completely off. I don't want everything in one app. I want compartmentalization. I value it, in fact.
> The West spent 150 years building coal plants, then natural gas, then slowly adding renewables. China went from burning coal directly to becoming the world's solar panel factory. They make 80% of all solar panels globally.
China is also, incidentally the coal king of the world, and has rapidly expanded coal production over the last few decades. Their coal consumption has tripled since 2000. For all the breathless commentary on solar the author spares no ink on China's appetite for coal.
The reason people still claim China is a developing country is so that they get a pass on arbitrary restrictions imposed on "developed" Western nations who like to pay lip service to climate change concerns and don't mind the gradual decline that comes along with this antigrowth mindset. Meanwhile the world has outsourced production to China, where coal makes up a majority of the electricity generated. Your country is getting leapfrogged by a competitor who doesn't play by your rules, but at least you can virtue signal to your elite friends while it happens.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China
While California can't build anything these days, I would not hold their dysfunction to the rest of the Union. Florida built high speed rail between West Palm Beach and Orlando in just 4 years, and the route extends to Miami. Tesla built Giga Texas, the second largest building in the world by volume, in 14 months. American tech is also in the lead in self driving navigation.
> China skipped the strip mall phase entirely. They went straight from street markets to super-apps that livestream shopping, where one influencer can sell $15 million worth of lipstick in five minutes
China was never going to have strip malls. Strip malls are a feature of suburban life. China does not have the same geography nor the same decentralized population distribution as the U.S. has.
As for livestream shopping, spare me. Americans don't shop via livestream because we're not entertained by the idea of being pitched crap we don't need. It's not novel to us either, we had the QVC network going back to the 80s. When I buy something, I search, click add to cart, and then checkout.
> We’re going to solve climate change with a lot of Chinese technology—or we’re not going to solve it at all.
If you buy the idea that we're going to solve for climate change with Chinese tech while China continues to pollute more than ever, I don't know what to tell you.
China's "tech" in this case isn't their tech. Japan has produced more of the IP surrounding solar panels than anyone else, followed by the U.S.
They have a lot of coal so they burn coal. The US has a lot of natural gas so it burns natural gas (and bafflingly, continues to insist on burning coal, even when it's uneconomical). So they're about even.
There is one difference. 80% of new electricity generation in China in the past 3 or 4 years has come from solar or other renewable sources. So while they may burn coal now, they won't always burn coal. America has sadly chosen a different path.
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...
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.
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.
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
yunnan is rural historic farm area, next to tibet, it's not supposed to have mcdo. did author cry he couldn't get shake shack in tibet?
Are they leading in solar panels? wow ... almost like cheap labor and non-existent pollution control makes manufacturing real cheap. Did you hear they're also mining and burning more coal than ever, despite the west's alleged 150 year advantage. But let's forget that. we can totally trust china to remove coal by 2030 like promised.
we call china "emerging" because most (numbers, not the average) of its people make less than 10k per year. most of its rich people aren't investing in stocks or bonds. the government still needs to direct investment in large swaths of society, that is why china earns its "developing" label.
do you think china's courts are developed? we call them emerging or developing, because they haven't shown to be independent yet and they issue political rulings like in some ... developing ... banana republic. that's why it's called developing. their institutions aren't particularly ... instituted.
misleading calling china leader in heat pumps ... yes cheap heat pumps. good for them. but volume doesn't mean good, everyone likes cheap stuff.
china makes 5 year government plans public, what is this 20 year plan he talks about? what is the success rate of these public plans? remember, they promised to control coal and reduce usage by 2030.
small countries like singapore becoming more authoritarian by copying chinese politics isn't the bragging win you think it is.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
Take the example of Britain, where they currently have a larger ethnic British Pakistani population than the British Indian population. Yet there are only 25% Indian households and 33% Chinese households in the bottom income quintile, while there are 44% Pakistani households and 49% Bangladeshi households in the same (White British is at 17%). On the other hand, Indians and Chinese are massively represented in the top income quintile at 20% and 28% of households (compared to White British at 21%). Only 7% of either Bangladeshi or Pakistani British come in the top income quintile, even underperforming the Other Asian category (who are 2x at 14%).
Data source: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/work-pay-...
https://m.economictimes.com/nri/migrate/indians-top-list-of-...
Perhaps one could argue that Indian migrants tend to be educational and work migrants, while Pakistani migrants tend to be family reunification migrants. But that again points back to the cultural reasons behind certain communities doing well, based on what they prioritize.
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.
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.
I fully support what they did.
The ruling group think they are enlighten more than everyone else and justified to use force/coercion to apply their will on other people (or just an excuse/scam to abuse power)
The idea actually works if, and only if, the ruling group has empathy for the population as a whole. Which - in spite of anti-government propaganda in the US - is at least partially possible.
It's catastrophic when the ruling ethic is narcissism and supremacism.
To summarize, you're on the wrong side.
Ideally it means a population which is educated, rational, and mature enough to rise to the challenge with minimal prompting and direction. But if that fails, stronger persuasion becomes necessary - which may mean sanctions and enforcement.
US (and UK) individualism struggles with this, which creates a weaker, less resilient, and more dangerous low-trust high-paranoia society for everyone.
The Chinese are more used to 吃苦, which is an alien concept in the US.
You can take that too far - and arguably China has - where there's a complete lack of concern for individuals.
The ideal is a balance, and I'm not sure either culture has it.
But the Chinese are going in the direction of massively expanding these programmes (ranging from medical care to education to housing to elderly and disability care), while the USA is actively gutting their own.
>emergency rooms cannot turn away patients Sure but that's not real "health care".. again, it's the bare minimum.
Saying the US takes care of it's old people is sort of silly. Healthcare is through the roof. Social security is so low. Elder care is insanity expensive. People are worked far older than they should be because they can't afford to retire- especially with medical costs. Old people continue to pay property taxes on a home they might have paid off 20 years ago.
Really just do some searches yourself; it's like most other developed countries than the US.. health care, education is not insanely expensive, a lot of paid maternity leave, childcare assistance, etc. They provide the base people need.
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...
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.
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.
That does not seem to be the case anymore under Xi.
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 many more.
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.
The US is dragged down by an archaic political system designed for a pre-industrial society of slavers that immediately devolved into a two-party binary of entrenched elites - a system the US doesn't even spread when it does nation building because it's so fundamentally broken.
So yeah, the solution here is just don't be like the US.
Also, it's logically impossible for China to be good. I have found a mathematical proof:
1: Democracy is good
2: China is not a democracy
Therefore, obviously China is not good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni...
The war on corruption in China[0] is noteworthy where by 2023 “2.3 million government officials have been prosecuted”.
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-corruption_campaign_und...
Author sounds like someone on their way from a week-end in the Huxleyan London of Brave New World. Everything was so beautiful. Freedom? Fuck that.
If we're going to compete with a free market against China's hybrid-communism, then we should do things that enable the strengths of a free market to be realized.
If our free market is a Magic The Gathering deck, it's like we're a blue deck that refuses to put any blue mana into the deck. Our deck isn't losing because it has bad ideas, it's because we weren't willing to put any of the supporting cards into play.
Patents are mostly used by large companies to protect themselves against smaller companies that could be more efficient. We choose to use patents in a way that stifles new competition. We refuse to put the "efficient new competitor" card in our deck.
Intellectual property lasts for--what?--150 years these days. Ridiculous.
What about labor vs capital? Income is taxed more than capital gains. This is not based on economic theory or anything, this is just a decision we've made. We have chosen to value moving money and capital around more than working and building things.
What about the "free" in free market?
Do we make it easy for laborers to move around freely? Nope.
We have weak social safety nets. Healthcare is tied to employment as though those who are not working a traditional job deserve to die.
We allow Jimmy John's to include non-complete clauses to prevent their workers from making sandwiches for a company that pays more.
We also allow a form of indentured servitude via "TRAPs"[0] which prevent workers from moving freely in the market.
We're trying to compete as a free market without allowing most of the things that make free markets effective because they would be inconvenient for those who already have wealth and power.
When the private data of millions of people is leaked twice a month, nobody cares--or rather, nobody with power to do something about it cares.
When giant companies fail because they made bad decisions, we bail them out, thus eliminating the opportunity for new and smarter companies to grow.
Our law making system seems completely unable to change any of these things and has devolved into one man making unpredictable threats and orders that are probably illegal and unenforceable, but most just follow them anyways.
What does it mean when the things that happen in a healthy free market aren't happening?
> 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.
People and development go together. The more people you have, the more development you can have. India is experiencing a similar early growth trajectory (from a GDP and energy use perspective), because like China, they have over a billion people. Comparatively, the US for example, has a few hundred million people.
Historically, this has always been the case. China and India were the most populated places and biggest economies for much of the past several millennia
What held China and India back the past few centuries? The west, through its Opium wars and colonialism. Globalization accelerated a reversion to the mean
The takeaway here shouldn't be to end democracy and turn to state capitalism or mercantilism. For the US to keep up, it will need more people. Or AGI I guess
What ideologues often forget is that their beliefs don’t pay rent. They don’t feed the hungry, they don’t create economic growth, they don’t solve problems. Yes, democracy is phenomenal and I think that direct democracy is the current peak governance model out there, but look at how easily Western Democracies have been captured by capital, how western economies lost the plot of the long game and failed to solve problems because they’re so myopically focused on next quarter growth at all costs and shareholder returns. We point our fingers at the abuse of the Uyghurs by China and prison labor, but conveniently ignore the migrants crossing the Mediterranean that our countries let drown, or the immigrants being kidnapped by governments, or the American prison industrial complex’s outsized impact on non-white communities, or NATO’s abuse of and complicity in the genocide of Muslims and Arabs. We crow about Chinese mass surveillance while feeding Meta, Google, Palantir, and the NSA with all our data.
Which is to say, we actually aren’t that different.
And when you begrudgingly swallow that uncomfortable truth, you begin to see how we’re objectively worse off now and in the near future than our Chinese peers. Our infrastructure crumbles because we allowed Capital to neglect it, while China’s whisks its citizenry around quickly and efficiently using EVs and HSR. Our employment markets are similar in struggles for the youth and the cost of living crisis, yet China at least acknowledges the issue and attempts to support its people while Western governments embrace austerity and blame labor for being robbed by Capital. Whilst Capital decries over-regulation as hindering its prosperity here, Chinese firms flourish under a far more strict regime because they understand politics is a fool’s errand for entities designed to make goods or provide services.
I love what China has done, even if I’m disgusted with the horrors it has wrought on others to achieve it. Where I differ from others is that I’m not naive enough to believe we’re assured victory simply based on ideology, morals, or ethics alone, nor do I engage in the denialism so many worship when cheerleading anti-DEI, anti-science, and anti-labor talking points in a vain attempt to boost personal worth at the expense of others.
This is the last real chance for Western governments to establish, at the very least, a balance with China in the century ahead. China still needs western R&D, western technologies, western patents, and western money, at least for the time being.
Once they have a competitive navy? Once they’ve transitioned to renewables? Once they’ve closed their supply chains and can recycle their waste into new products? Once they’ve solved the hard problems Capital never can, because they’re not immediately profitable to do so?
Then we’re cooked.
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.
Numerous people were at pains to point out how these assumptions were overbroad or outright wrong, but could not get a hearing. In the US, people are heavily propagandized from childhood to believe that the United States is the greatest country in the world. Most other countries don't do this. They have national pride, people will casually say their country is the best, but they mean it in the sense of it being their favorite, not as some objective fact. They don't do daily pledges of allegiance at schools or sing the national anthem at every single sports fixture. This is a recipe for cognitive dissonance.
Now of course people debate things online, in the media, and in academia, but often ideas that go against the grain are just entertained as polite abstractions compared to the greatest-country-in-the-world 'reality'. You can see this very clearly in politics, where a lot of people in Congress just don't really understand of believe perspectives that don't align with this default, and that goes a long way toward explaining how we have so many political actors that are increasingly and often aggressively detached from reality.
The United States would have become a superpower regardless of what political system it adopted. If you give a bunch of settlers with relatively advanced technology access to an entire continent that's geographically isolated and only thinly populated by indigenous people with simpler technology, and that continent is rich in natural resources, the settlers and their descendants are going to prosper. The US constituted itself as a republic out of pragmatism; even if the founders had wanted to establish an American monarchy, they couldn't very well have instituted one based on the divine right of kings while repudiating their existing remote monarch. The British empire, constituted on a very different basis, continued to prosper for another 150 years after the US detached itself.
In both cases, the countries had overwhelming strategic advantages; isolation and unspoiled resources in the American case, technological and naval superiority in the British. The foundational ethos on which the polity is run and which holds the population together is important, of course, but any ethos will do as long as the population is willing to go along with it.
I don't think China's current conditions are the product of communism especially - as many have pointed out, they have something more akin to state capitalism now. The authoritarian structures in Chinese society have roots going back ~2200 years, to when the state of Qin managed to establish imperial authority and a centralized state with a bureaucracy and national political infrastructure instead of a feudal system. That centralized state has mutated or broken down numerous times over the centuries but has always been re-established in some form or other because it provided more general advantage to the polity as well as its rulers. About 1500 years they instituted imperial examination systems, which recruited state officials through merit rather than ancestry or wealth.
Modern China adopted communism partly to throw off the shackles of colonial powers; my shallow take is that coming under the partial control of western nations like Britain and Germany induced a sort of culture-shock paralysis, but being further subjugated by their upstart neighbors from Japan (which country's name is synonymous with shortness/weakness in the Chinese language) shook them out of it. Communists were able to combine nationalist sentiment with the long-standing disaffections of the peasantry and a solid grasp of insurgent military tactics, during a period when other great powers were distracted by warring with each other. Following WW2 they speedran the industrial revolution: while the human costs were atrocious, I'm not sure that they were actually worse than those in the west, just more concentrated in time. Now they've speedrun consumer and technological economic development and exploring their imperial/hegemonic opportunities, a process which will play out for another 1-2 centuries, if history is any guide: https://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf
said guide is a heuristic rather than a rule, of course; ancient Egyptian civilization is thought to have persisted for about 3000 years. You live in closer historical proximity to Cleopatra than she did to the first builders of pyramids.
To wrap up, my basic point is that Chinese authoritarianism isn't a product of communism so much as a reconstruction of a centralized state that has served the country for millenia, about 8 times longer than American society has existed. Nor do I think it's 'eating the world'; rather, China is resuming its historical place as a hegemonic power and is merely eating America's lunch. This is understandably unsettling to American strategic thinkers, some of whom had fallen into the trap of believing their own hype about a unipolar world in recent decades, and others of whom viewed China's ascendancy in manichean terms due to communism rather than looking at it in systematic terms and considering as simply a continuation of long-running historical patterns accelerated by technological change.
Success is attributed to repressive and uninclusive government sytems rather than to the far more decisive factors: market reforms, foreign capital, and global trade integration. By collapsing this complexity into a single flattering story about centralized control, the piece functions more as an ideology and propaganda piece than a real good faith analysis of China's root causes of success.
The narrative also erases China’s structural advantages: the world’s largest labor force and vast natural resources that made global dominance in manufacturing and supply chains possible. These advantages would likely have delivered major growth under democracy, and possibly with less fragility, failure, and human rights abuse. By crediting authoritarianism instead, the article smuggles in a propagandistic message: authoritarian control isn’t incidental but necessary for technological and societal success. Bullshit!
Hmm I don't know about those so called "western values" - seems to me there's a lot of hypocrisy in western nations, where we look down on so called authoritarian societies as wrong or even evil. As TFA says, it looks like the Chinese government is delivering for its people, while it's clear that western democracies are not.
skeptrune•5h ago
I'd be interested to see something with more detail and citations. Or maybe even a rebuttal piece.
B1FF_PSUVM•5h ago
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-top-countries-by-ann...
zemvpferreira•5h ago
drake99•5h ago
skeptrune•5h ago
mysterypie•4h ago
I can accept a facial scan, but I draw the line at fingerprints and more invasive biometrics.
drake99•4h ago
jama211•2h ago
netsharc•2h ago
At an airport, there was a sign that said "Stand in front of the camera and we'll tell you the way to your gate.". It scanned my face, and on the screen it showed me my name (I guess to make sure it's the correct person), my gate, and how to walk there. I never consented to this commercial use...
vessenes•1h ago
CamperBob2•1h ago
They already have everything on us, and I mean everything.
coldpie•2h ago
WaxProlix•5h ago
I'd be interested in a rebuttal piece too, because I don't necessarily want reality to be what it is. But it is, and it is.
_Algernon_•5h ago
neptuneskeptic•5h ago
bryanlarsen•5h ago
RandomBacon•5h ago
While the U.S. has Eminent Domain, although China's version seems to be more impactful (displacing 1.3 million people for the Three Gorges Dam).
Fricken•4h ago
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china...
skeptrune•5h ago
I think it's mostly this that makes me uncomfortable. I value Western ideals and am hopeful that they continue to spread.
churchill•5h ago
For instance, California's Intercity High-Speed Rail Commission was created by the California legislature in 1993 (before my parents got married) to develop a plan that was to begin construction in 2000.
32 years later, it's still not done, yet China has built nearly 50,000 km of HSR in less than 20 years. The differences are as blatant as that between oranges and orangutans.
kelipso•5h ago
skeptrune•5h ago
I hear you though.
churchill•4h ago
For those within the imperial core. War, death, sanctions, and dilution of wealth for everyone outside it/whoever attempts to disagree.
bdangubic•4h ago
delta_p_delta_x•5h ago
Until fairly recently, this meme[1] encapsulated 'Western ideals'.
[1]: https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/237132471/Peter-Griffin-sk...
ujkhsjkdhf234•2h ago
supportengineer•2h ago
Somehow we ended up with Trump. Whatever system that brings you a Trump is a bad system.
tokioyoyo•1h ago
stefan_•5h ago
WaxProlix•5h ago
swiftcoder•5h ago
lenkite•4h ago
Unemployment rate for youth (16- to 24-year-olds) in China ticked up to 17.8% in July . The US youth unemployment rate in the U.S. was 10.8 percent in July 2025.
So a difference of 7%.
AnimalMuppet•5h ago
I'm gonna need a source for that one.
Best source I found quickly was Wikipedia, with 2023 data, showing China at about 2.5 times the US. That's surprising to me, but it's not an order of magnitude.
porphyra•5h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
bigcat12345678•5h ago
What are depths you look?
Are you not familiar with China's relentless obsession with education and excellence? The cutthroat competition in business, the insane persistence in long-term planning and execution, the vast land of rich treasure underground, the emoumous long history of singular view of history and ancestry?
All these are traits of greatness.
And they have the brutal struggle from external invasion and internal turmoil since 1800s, those hard time breed generations of strong man, men who not only endure physical hardership, intellectual struggles, and spiritual torment, they embrace it, treat them as enjoyable and rewarding. They not only are instant in action, they are also ruthless in reflection. They dire to challenge the strongest coalition of power when they were just gained independence, they are also totally ok to subdue to the same super power when they decide so, without much of a mental conflicting, while still maintaining a unwavering commitment to greatness beyond anyone else's imagination.
China is bound to be the overlord of the nations on earth. That or it vanquish itself in its pursuit of that destiny.
What else do you need to know?