China has course-corrected many times before. They’ll do it again.
I think the US should be more worried. Their govt makes it incredibly hard to course-correct (filibuster, gerrymandering, fptp, electoral college, supreme court etc)
The "official" data reported by China can't be attempted to be believed. Most of it is highly manipulated. Attempts at independent verification are punished, or blocked by making the raw data a state secret.
That's not to say that data reported by other countries is completely accurate or free of political manipulation. But there's a enormous difference between China and democratic countries.
> The "official" data reported by China can't be attempted to be believed. Most of it is highly manipulated. Attempts at independent verification are punished, or blocked by making the raw data a state secret.
This has not been really true for at least a decade.
Well they might attempt to play with statistics, there are definitely foreign investigative reports that are able to verify most numbers, especially when it comes to exports.
And most of those foreign numbers are very close to what China reports.
The Chinese government’s rising life expectancy story is corroborated by estimates by independent organizations such as the WHO: https://data.who.int/countries/156
> The "official" data reported by China can't be attempted to be believed. Most of it is highly manipulated. Attempts at independent verification are punished, or blocked by making the raw data a state secret.
If that's the case, then you should be able to provide tons of evidence. It's difficult to "hide" or "manipulate" data in a country the size of china that is tied to the global trading system.
> But there's a enormous difference between China and democratic countries.
"Democratic countries". Like russia? Or venezuela? Oh, let me guess, democratic countries you don't like are not "democratic countries". Right.
You are just repeating the standard anti-china propaganda. It's the same of nonsense over and over again.
"None of china's data can be trusted. They are lying and they are about to collapse". Followed by, "Oh my god china is an existential threat. They are going to overtake us. Deep seek, rare earth minerals blah blah blah".
I'm old enough to remember when supposedly Japan was going to overtake us. Their economy was growing rapidly under MITI control while ours was stagnating. At the peak in 1991 the nominal value of real estate in Japan was higher than all of North America.
Then the bubble popped in 1992 and Japan has been struggling ever since. The same thing will inevitably happen to China although it may take a while. Central planning is great at creating the illusion of growth but when you probe deeper you find the actual fair market value generated is much less.
Theres the little matter of the US imposed Plaza Accords that have been skipped in the timeline there , which are widely acknowledged to have precipitated Japan's lost decades.
> Theres the little matter of the US imposed Plaza Accords that have been skipped in the timeline there , which are widely acknowledged to have precipitated Japan's lost decades.
Actually, no. The CPC generally argues this is the case, but it is largely incorrect. Japan responded to the Plaza accords by attempting to massively increase stimulus and preserve the structure (significant industrial, limited service/consumption economy) they started.
In contrast, (West) Germany kept the stimulus relatively low and rotated into higher productivity enterprises and R&D and had a substantially lessened impact. See this (https://www.atlantis-press.com/article/125961733.pdf)
The whole "US destroyed Japan with the Plaza accords" is basically CPC propaganda.
China will have its own issues, but I would guess they look more like the 1992 sterling crisis where China cannot hold its yuan peg as it continues to have trade expansion without corresponding foreign exchange growth.
China has collapsed multiple times: in 1967, 1960, 1937, 1916, 1856, and so on. Another collapse probably isn't imminent but based on historical patterns it's entirely possible in our lifetimes. There could be an external shock in terms of a severe disruption in food or energy imports, or an internal power struggle between CCP factions. And even if China doesn't exactly collapse, a slow stagnation like what happened to Japan after 1992 is quite possible.
The main difference I'd say with China is population. They have 5x the people of the US and that just gives them a massive advantage. They also have the authoritarian government that's able to have a consistent focus on a mercanalist vision. They also have a large enough domestic market to develop technology.
The US is in serious trouble. If you don't believe trump has already done irreversible damage, he will soon.
Yes it is. Unless you’re saying it’s not “old democratic” any more. Which is true since Mao Zedong Thought contains what he calls and enacted as “new democracy”.
I’d be curious what your definition of democracy is. Mine is the will of the people is happening and it’s systematic and institutional. That for example doesn’t happen in America and never has as evidenced by the constitution
Not hanging a portrait of an insane murderous tyrant in the middle of your capital city? Has there been any other person who was directly responsible for a higher number of deaths in China than him?
Mao Zedong was an idiot who badly damaged China. Democracy requires the freedom to create new political parties and for anyone to run in honest elections. The fact that the CCP is the only political party allowed in China proves it isn't democratic by definition.
The US is absolutely not the gold standard for democracy. In fact the GOP's goal seems to be to become a single party dictatorship much like the CCP is.
I don't think there are many democracies in the world. Republics are not démocraties as you elect a master instead of giving power to the people. Corruption sets in and rot everything in due time.
Democracy mean that all citizen inherently have equal legitimacy and capacity to exert political power.
For true démocraties you either need random choice of citizens who decide, or votes by all citizen.
We currently have a bunch of oligarchies around the world bending the laws in ridiculous manners to answer to those with power (currently mostly, but not necessarily, the very rich).
You only need to study the past of our "démocraties" when violent and deadly répression of popular upheaval to the benefit of industry barons was a regular thing.
Nowadays you get more of these things in slightly indirect ways, ergonomic social and cultural violence. Also, a brief mention of the Epstein files make it pretty obvious that the people's will does not really matter.
And do not think one second this is unique to America. A few years ago in France you had the Europe referendum, a rare moment of democracy, where the people voted "the wrong way" according to the néolibérals in power, and thus they proceeded to simply ignore said vote.
The founders of our various political systems made it pretty clear they despised democracy in the first place. The word became popular relatively recently...
Democracy is a radical idea. I don't even think many people in this forum actually want democracy. They will think plumbers, or nurses, of people of the "opposite party" are subhumans unfit to decide for the good of the people.
Standard communist playbook: as soon as something is embarrassing (like the youth unemployment rate in China), declare it a state secret. The fact that it's getting hard to find something they're not hiding is not a good sign.
The list of things they're hiding is getting pretty damn long: internal trade statistics, housing sales, population numbers (first in the "ghost cities", then border regions, now all of China), disease statistics (they suddenly classified COVID statistics, now everything), unemployment rate (started with unemployed miners, then youth, now everything), immigration/emigration policies, economic growth, how they're treating various ethnic groups (Nepalese, Uyghurs, ...)
A big question a lot of people are starting to ask: is the data the government itself is operating on still accurate? Because, of course, in Soviet Russia and other communist states it wasn't. Such states made very large, often disastrous, decisions based on fictitious data, so odds seem good the same is unfolding in China.
It’s clear you didn’t read your links because this one concludes with:
> "Scholars in China and at the UN have analyzed these and other data. Not a single person has 'discovered' such a huge discrepancy." ... "China has had at least three censuses since the start of the millennium, and there has been no evidence that more than 100 million people are overreported in China," Wang said.
> If that's the case, then you should be able to provide tons of evidence. It's difficult to "hide" or "manipulate" data in a country the size of china that is tied to the global trading system.
not very tied, actually, precisely because of heavy government interventions
> "Democratic countries". Like russia? Or venezuela? Oh, let me guess, democratic countries you don't like are not "democratic countries". Right.
I think that we can agree that democratic countries are countries where there is a choice and you see changes of government caused by free elections. That's not the case for Russia or Venezuela but it is (still) the case for most of the Western world
> You are just repeating the standard anti-china propaganda. It's the same of nonsense over and over again.
> "None of china's data can be trusted. They are lying and they are about to collapse". Followed by, "Oh my god china is an existential threat. They are going to overtake us. Deep seek, rare earth minerals blah blah blah".
> Make up your mind.
There is a bizarre reverence and worship for China I have observed with some Americans. Yes, you can build things faster and have smooth 5% YoY growth if you don’t have property rights and manipulate the statistics
There's also a bizarre need to simultaneously downplay them and fear them in other Americans. If they're so weak, why the fear?
They have high speed rail connecting the whole country, and lots of other stuff which is real and not a number in a spreadsheet. They crashed their housing sector by building too much.
The very reason that China can bulldoze thousands of homes for a new highway or train, are the very things that would make an American scream “fascism” at an authoritarian government
> Moses's critics charge that he preferred automobiles over people. They point out that he displaced hundreds of thousands of residents in New York City and destroyed traditional neighborhoods by building multiple expressways through them. The projects contributed to the ruin of the South Bronx and the amusement parks of Coney Island, caused the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants Major League Baseball teams to relocate to Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively, and precipitated the decline of public transport from disinvestment and neglect.
There used to be an entire road and tenement houses in Seattle where I5 is now. They’ve also taken all or part of many properties abutting the new rail project.
For us Westerners our highway system was already pretty much complete by the 1980s so none of us actually remember how it went.
But when we see pictures in historybooks you will see sprawling construction sites with bulldozers...
There have been several posts on HN in my recollection about the building of highways in urban areas in the USA over the objections of local residents, it's just if they are poor or minorities they historically do not have the political power to stop these projects, and the private sector makes a bundle, which is the recipe for a lot of things that go wrong in the USA.
Exept that in reality the US bulldosed cities as agrssivly as China and still does many idiotic projects. The reason it doesnt happen as often today is that less is invest and the lesser amount that is invested doesnt go as far as it did before.
The differnece today in the US is not that they dont bulldoze its that before they bulldoze there is years of political battle.
I follow various groups around the US that try to fight highway expansions and the almost always lose in the end.
I don’t think I have any illusions. I’d never want to live under Chinese censorship, lack of civil rights, the weird errors caused by centralized economic control.
But I can also acknowledge some of the things they do well.
Having a nuanced view of a complex topic is probably essential for proper understanding.
Also, if many western countries don’t get their shit together, their lives will be greatly influenced by China at current trajectory. Which particularly involves the negatives. China's success should be motivation to many western ex-empires, excellence nostalgia hubs and industrial graveyards.
And yeah, credit where credit is due, I think no observer seriously doubts the great feat China pulled off in such a short period of time, even if the stats are not reliable. People travel there, Jobs warned about this years ago.
And between US, Russia and Israel, China is the least obnoxious villain in my news feed. They somehow conquer the world without cringe overdrive and the undignified post-pretending social media executive memefare. China does not make me wanna drive a dining fork into my frontal lobe, it’s more like the cough that doesn’t go away.
Well, Russian, Hebrew and English are not my country's languages either and yet here we are.
Listen, I am not at all celebrating Chinese politics as absolute, their grave human rights violations, minority suppression, the Uyghur genocide or imperialist ambitions. I am not even saying they are the least, in fact they are probably the most dangerous. But they contribute little to the erosion of political dignity in my reality.
I've been talking so much shit on China over the years I decided I'd come over when the opportunity presented itself to visit. I'm in Shanghai and mostly it feels the same as any capitalist city except it's super clean. Everyone is shopping, living their lives. All of the Chinese I've interacted with are super pleasant. What really struck me was the decency and patience of the border control and security control folks coming over. In western countries I'd typically get exasperated annoyed calls to do this or that.
Anyway, it got me thinking that mostly the freedoms we are afforded, which are very precious to me, seem to come at great cost. A cost people under countries like China would rather bear when the affordances are clean streets, no or little homelessness and the freedom to consume luxury assets.
Every time I visit the US (frequently) I'm just assaulted by its continual, very visible rot. Cities like Seattle and Los Angeles are just fundamentally unsafe places to walk around in. The huge climb of school shootings over the last decade should have everyone alarmed. Americans appear to be stuck in the race to the bottom of who can be the greatest victim and the truly extreme painting of the Left or Right depending on which side you're on because people would rather obsess and come into conflict over what gender they can identify as or race guilt (or its opposite if you're a minority) rather than unite over common class struggles that are eating the country alive.
I think most people would rather pick comfort and safety over the freedom to say what you want and a right to privacy. I'm not sure I blame them when the alternative is getting sexually assaulted trying to walk to your car in LA (speaking from many many second-hand stories of American friends) or having your kid shot and killed in school.
It's a lot easier for China to limit the homeless problem in Shanghai when they have the hukou system to keep them out. But it is a shame that we have allowed failed progressive policies to wreck some of our cities.
I’ve lived in the USA, China (Beijing), a Switzerland (Lausanne), and I’m not sure what your point is. Guess the only place where riot police stormed my apartment because I wasn’t registered correctly?
There is much to love about authoritarian states. Clean, safe cities, and a suppression of news and other information to keep (naive) people comfortable. Draconian law and migration enforcement (eg, the hukou and propiska systems, and external borders) have their advantages, and looking at Singapore and Japan you don't necessarily need the rest.
Luckily if enough Americans agree with you in a few more years you can vote him out. Can you say the same for Winnie the poo (xi)
I have a feeling however, that since the leftist priorities these days are so ridiculous to the regular voter that you'll just get another republican president
> Luckily if enough Americans agree with you in a few more years you can vote him out. Can you say the same for Winnie the poo (xi)
You are weirdly naive about thinking Trump has any respect for democracy and that his camp isn't going to do everything possible to maintain power at all cost.
American relationship to China is frankly weird on every sides.
Between the ones who apparently can’t fathom a world where other countries are as economically successful as the USA and see it as a threat and the ones who are fascinated by its authoritarian policies, it’s really hard to have a dispassionate conversation involving China.
90% of Chinese own their own properties vs 65% of Americans, so there's that. Regarding property rights, I'm not sure how it works there but we've all seen the malls and highways that diverted around homes where owners were unwilling to sell out. Also, they actually have functional public infrastructure and have brought something like 800 million out of abject poverty. Are ahead of us in several spaces and about to pass us or at least equal us in others. Obviously I'm not arguing for that type of top down authoritarian system, but this is the objective reality. What's bizarre actually is all the denialism and copium over China - should we not be glad that they are doing better than they were 30 years ago and much more liberal than before?
By "own" you mean 70 year leases with ??? renewal conditions?
> Urban land use rights in Mainland China were typically granted for fixed terms: 70 years for residential, 50 years for office or industrial, and 40 years for commercial purposes. As these terms approach expiration, the question of renewal becomes paramount. The legal framework, primarily the Property Law and the Urban Real Estate Administration Law, provides a general outline but leaves specific implementation to local governments.
> Mainland China’s Property Law (Article 149) and The Civil Code of Mainland China (Article 359) guarantee automatic residential land use right renewals but provides no specific arrangement in respect of non-residential terms. Currently, without detailed implementation guidelines, local governments devise varied approaches, skewing valuations and unsettling investors. This uncertainty hinders market efficiency.
If you follow the public policy discussions in China, you’ll likely notice more complication surrounding the 70-year leases. Basically everyone already feel they own the property, the government’s forceful attempt to reclaim property would be counterproductive and unlikely to succeed. Additionally, many government officials are not particularly fond of this policy. They prefer property tax like US. Individuals currently do not pay property tax in China, they are reluctant to pay property tax and argue that they have indirectly paid them when purchasing property. Consequently, the property tax and ownership restructuring are essentially stuck in a stalemate.
I agree that that is a meaningful difference, but since I expect to be be on my last legs at best 70 years from now, it really doesn't make much of a difference to me, especially when contrasted to here where my home owning plans amount to little more than "hopefully the housing market will collapse"
Give the average person in china the opportunity to move to America, and vice versa, there is no comparison. China has done some things right but to pretend it is some model for America is absurd
I would absolutely take a chance to live in China, but I wouldn’t expect to be welcomed there. Their tech, disposable income, food costs, etc are so superior to what we have today in US.
The average person in America is living paycheck to paycheck and has negative equity.
20 years ago you couldn’t see in Shanghai. Trump pulled back the clean air act, it’s not hard to see a trend. It’s also not hard to buy a ticket and see it yourself.
Great point, I almost wrote that they’ve cleaned up pollution (of all types) by a lot and also are accomplish some impressive feats by regreening and pushing back desertification. Amazing things can happen when you get your peoples basic needs met (ie, they can focus on higher level stuff).
60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. It depends on which Americans you are looking at if you want to understand who capitalist ownership is benefiting.
> There is a bizarre reverence and worship for China I have observed with some Americans.
No. There isn't. It's just that we've gotten sick of the bullshit and lies from the anti-china propagandists like you.
> Yes, you can build things faster and have smooth 5% YoY growth if you don’t have property rights and manipulate the statistics
If they can build things faster, what need is there to manipulate the statistics? If the chinese don't have property rights, then how come they own so much property?
When you and your kind spout such nonsense over and over again, people tend to get sick of it.
> If they can build things faster, what need is there to manipulate the statistics?
A lot to unpack here. You completely blipped over the part about “no property rights” which is pretty clear when you look at, for example, how their rail construction projects go. Choochoo, rail is coming through, time to move this village, no eminent domain payments necessary.
> If the chinese don't have property rights, then how come they own so much property?
If ownership of a half-finished concrete shell by a bankrupt construction firm on the 33rd floor is counted as “owning property”, then the statistics will look pretty good.
My great-grandmother’s home, those of her neighbors, and their church was bulldozed for the US75/I45 rebuild/connection in Dallas in the 1950s. They were given the choice of new public housing built nearby in an industrial area (around Fair Park where State Fair of Texas is held) or figuring it out on their own. Being Black and low-income meant whatever rights they “had” were hard to come by.
I guess my point is rights and freedoms are unequally held, regardless of a nation’s stated values and laws. What makes/made the US great is not that things happening in China couldn’t happen here. It’s that we (used to?) aspire to greater ideals about individual freedom even if it isn’t present for all. CCP and I think Chinese citizens are under no such illusion, and in some cases reject the individual for the collective. (I’m hedging a bit since my understanding is limited second-hand anecdotes from Chinese American friends).
> You completely blipped over the part about “no property rights” which is pretty clear when you look at, for example, how their rail construction projects go. Choochoo, rail is coming through, time to move this village
Better than exterminating the natives to build railroads? Using your logic we don't have property rights in the US either.
> If ownership of a half-finished concrete shell by a bankrupt construction firm on the 33rd floor is counted as “owning property”, then the statistics will look pretty good.
Yes. 1.4 billion people live in half-finished concrete shells.
Come up with something better. You guys are getting boring repeating the same nonsense over and over again.
Yes owning appartments is propery. I know that people in the US have an absurd glorification of the single family home but things other the single family homes are a thing in most of the world.
LoL what the actual fuck are you going on about? China is extremely particular about market rate eminent domain payments. The only difference being it's often a take it or leave it offer, but they make prompt payments nonetheless.
"China" isn't "China". Like everywhere else, there's a maze of conflictiong incentives. The CCP measures regional governments on their stats. Gaming there. Regional governments measure administrative areas, ditto. More gaming. No stats can be trusted in a society that does not prize allegiance to the truth above all else.
Let’s say it how it is, this is the cost of freedom. Yes, China can build more quickly and has advanced more technologically, but it came at the cost of freedom. The degree of freedom is not something I’m fit to argue.
Now, there are those they believe the difference in freedom is worth that technological advancement. I’m not so sure.
COVID was a great example of this. China was able to slow the virus spreading faster than the US since they were literally locking people into their homes. In the US, this didn’t happen because of the rights we have.
Strange to me that the US has fallen behind is supposedly due to its commitment to freedom. The ownership class sold out the industrial base for profit, beginning with Reagan. They’re the ones who have driven policy - and continue to do so in the current turn to naked authoritarianism. The freedom the US supposedly stands for is the freedom of the capitalist class. Is it any wonder we haven’t seen investment in public infrastructure that prioritizes public good over private profits? That would have be financed by taxing the private interests that determine our policies. Instead we finance wars and a police state.
The problem is that people use all kinds of alternative methods to measure GDP. Stuff like light emissions. Import and export volumes and so on. And broadly speaking those are not that different from the offical stats. So just claiming its all lies doesnt really work.
How is that relevant to the accuracy of their economic data?
Finalnd's long border with Russian and recent joining into NATO means they are actually relatively geopolitically important.
It’s easier for small countries to do certain things that’s much more difficult for large countries to do. And by your logic, North Korea is relevant too, and it is and Finland is too, but in very narrow areas; and not really relevant when talking about economics of big countries.
Okay…but I’m not going to say North Korea’s economic data is fraudulent, therefore implications for the economic data for large countries. Also, read the thread before replying to random phrases you see.
China doesn't report false numbers the way some democracies like India and the US are trying to do (upheaving the statistical agencies), or most autocracies do (outright fraud about the numbers). What they do is a different kind of reporting that I've seen typical for similar countries. Language twisting, different interpretation, different naming even. Slowing GDP growth? They'll take the GDP PPP and use that for news bites. Construction bust and crash? Nah, splendid increase in affordable housing supply. Korean War? LoL no, War of American Aggression in the Korean Peninsula.
I would argue that with the exception of the American Civil War, internal course corrections of the US during the last 250 years were a lot less violent than those of China. The Taiping Rebellion, the White Lotus Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution - lots of deaths and chaos involved.
(I omitted the civil war between CCP and the Kuomintag, which I consider roughly equivalent to the ACW.)
The past is the past. Sometimes it is a good predictor of the future, other times people learn the lessons of mistakes, making the past anti-correlated.
The history of China going back millennia is chock full of violent revolutions and civil wars. They don't seem to learn anything from mistakes. I fully expect another one in our lifetimes.
Civilization has been maintained in other places such as Egypt for just as long. You can argue about the degree of continuity but the modern nation state of China bears almost no resemblance to what existed on the same territory 5K years ago. So I don't understand what point you're trying to make.
"Surely a country’s positionality in the global system contributes to how much violence occurs within their borders?"
Surely, but how much? 1 per cent or 40 per cent? We don't know. As you say, nothing is a closed system.
For example, by 1949, China imported Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist school of thought, a totally culturally alien system constructed by (mostly long dead) Europeans, which was the root cause of the horrors of the Maoist era - none of which were imposed by external empires by force. For all its faults, the US never forced the Chinese to exterminate the sparrows or attempt to build a steel mill in every village, resulting in a massive economic collapse and death toll.
China had many famines before that during the century of humiliation. Maoism was itself a reaction to the dire social conditions of the time.
This doesn’t absolve Maoism of its policies which led to millions dying. (And yet we shouldn’t absolve the global capitalist system either which leads to millions of preventable deaths each year.)
Colonialist exploitation has been major historic driver over this timeframe (shifting to neo-colonialism in the world system post WW2). Admittedly it hasn’t been the only one. But our understanding of world history loses nuance if we gloss over colonialism and neo-colonialism over this period and treat historic events as due to the supposedly essential traits of this or that nation.
Political system may be one of the reasons (feudalism doesn't have a great record in preventing famines either), but the most salient explanation might be that a pre-modern economy with high density of population is inherently prone to famines - a bad drought will easily topple the precarious balance between demand and supply towards lack of food, and without a railway network it is nearly impossible to move food easily among places that don't have good ports.
I thought we were talking about the role of colonization in violence in China over the past 250 years. Most events you listed (Taiping rebellion, Boxer rebellion, CCP-KMT civil war) were the result of weakening of the Qing dynasty by foreign powers, its downfall, the chaos this produced during the Warlord era. The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution (again I’m not exonerating them) were themselves in large part reactions to the legacy of imperialism on China.
Generally under colonialism, the colonial power actively prevented any development of native capitalism in the colonies, even if the colonial power was capitalist in their home country. The goal was to prevent the colony from developing its own economy and rather to have the colony supply basic resources (food, minerals, oil, etc.) to the colonizer and force the colony to rely on goods from the colonizer.
It’s worth considering the famine in India at the end of the 19th century. The British integrated India into the world capitalist system in a way that directly led to famine: promotion of cash crops which led to vulnerability when drought struck; speculators hoarding food during famine (some stores of food even rotting while people starved); building of railways and ports (which were used to export food out of famine stricken areas for profit); and laissez faire relief policies. The death toll was in the millions. I found Mike Davis’ book Late Victorian Holocausts to be a good resource on this subject.
While the famines were real, and a result of British rule, that wasn't because India was part of a "world capitalist system". Capitalism doesn't just mean "people doing things for profit" but rather the use of capital to build up industry, which Britain had no intention of doing in India.
Capitalism is a system where one class of people (workers) sell their labor for the profit of another class (owners/capitalists). So feudalism was neither capitalist nor industrialist. Colonial capitalism - not typically industrial but still capitalist. Industrial capitalism - both industrialist and capitalist. The modern American economy - service based not industry based - but still capitalist.
Compared to Europe the US has turbo speed of self-correction. EU is not doing well and it will do worse over the next decade and there seems to be no political will to put the economy back on course. Just add more regulations, costs and spending and hope for the best seems the current mantra.
Right now corporate bonds are sold at lower rates and have better credit than the public bonds for a country like France. Combination of no faith in political stability and no faith in the ability to get spending under control.
I think a lot of EU countries are going to just keep stumbling into a financial crisis that will force cuts in pensions and wealth-fare at a scale not seen post ww2. The pyramid scheme is coming due.
Unclear why Europe's capabilities are a relevant come-back to a comparison between the US and China.
May be correct, the EU as an organisation isn't very powerful compared to member states, may be false, EU member states are much more diverse than American states.
The US doesn't course-correct, it barrels through when the outcome is appalling (1933) and when the leadership takes advantage of a break in the pattern (1964/1981).
The immobility of the US political system indicates it is ready to be broken in half, the reality of corporatocracy is that it is an endgame to itself in arbitrariness. Whereas all China has to do is exert its state economy leverage once the West's corporations/bonds evaporate.
The Chinese see resonance, interdependence, relationships. It's baked into their language. We see attributes, objects, units, individuals. We imposed these onto their businesses for the last 30 years, but don't think for a second we've dominated their culture. They are now far more able to use their language's inherent forms as guides to the economy.
You are to captured by your ideology. It does not really matter what you personally think about. The thing is that the EU has completely failed as a union to provide the economic growth we need and has no plan on how to address this. We are completely export dependent (about 50% of GDP, meaning any world economic crisis will cause massive unemployment and fiscal crisis) and our internal market has withered and the purchasing power is plummeting.
China is going to do what China does but it's economy is in tatters something you would probably know if you actually looked at what is happening with their economy. Combine that with the same demographic crisis as EU and you have another country that might have already hit it's economical peak. The leadership is showing no ability to create an internal market and is busy stomping out any dissent internally as economical reality sets in and people loose jobs and their future. Unless their turn their economy around creating an internal market any international economic crisis will collapse their export oriented economy.
I don't know why you think everything is so bleak. Yes, Europe is inter-connected to the world. We export a lot and we import a lot. Unemployment in Europe has been not been terrible for a long time.
Of course there is room for improvement and there are political challenges, for instance to enact the pension reforms needed for the demographic changes but Europe has achieved also a lot we can be proud of. Without Europe and without the single market, we would be facing the same issues Britain is facing: Being too small, unable to regulate anything on their own, dependent on foreign trade partners, etc.
Perception is what creates value. Nothing is unconnected. When perception is about resonance and interdependence as it is in the East, the economy functions as an arm of the state. The state is all that counts, which is how in China, the idea of ownership bows to the state. The West driven by individualism has an altogether different idea of what ownership is.
That's just meaningless word salad. If I have a bushel of wheat that's actual value, not "perception". On average over the long term, individualism has always created more value than collectivism.
By 2023, most private social credit initiatives had been shut down by the People's Bank of China, and regulations had cracked down on most local scoring pilot programs.[16]: 12
Lol, advocating for an autocratic system because they can pivot fast. If a less fortunate Chinese citizen would be allowed to speak their mind I'm pretty sure they would have a way less favourable opinion, even if the CCP would have 'great stats' in the international press (which at least partly is based on data they provide).
Civil liberties isn't the point being made, it's whether you scan steer a huge ship. Which, to the credit of the original commenter, China has proven they can do.
They've steered a massive ship (and its crew) well enough to corner the manufacturing market for everything, globally, in less than 30 years. They've steered that same ship well enough to create mirror (and sometimes superior) industries in pretty much everything else. They also created global soft power in the process.
If they need to retool/manage gig work, the command and control economy in China has a much better chance at figuring it out than waiting for the "hand of the market" in US.
Not to detract from the fact that China did indeed do a lot of things right, but I wonder how much of this was not going to happen anyway since the country was the most populated in the world and had low wages compared to the west.
The US, for the record, also steered it's economy well enough during Covid. But that was a 2016 Trump administration, which still had adults in the room, and a 2020 Biden one.
The value of free speech, democracy, capitalism, *is* making pivoting faster.
The first world didn't win the cold war despite doing these things, but because those things actually helped us (all of us, not just the US) course-correct in ways the USSR didn't.
If China has a different way to be flexible, or if the USA looses its flexibility, the USA will fail to keep up with China in the same way and for the same reason the USSR couldn't keep up with the USA.
The US problem is they are going from a global brutal empire to a shrinking empire. But the debt and lifestyle of the US is still that of a global empire. That is what has broken many past empires and will break the US empire.
Please don't cross into personal attack or name-calling, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. You can make your substantive points without any of that.
You're a "simple person" if you think that bringing GLP-1 to the masses or smoking cessation won't have monumental impacts on public health - of course thinking is something that non P zombies do...
Serious, qualified doctors are already calling for nearly everyone to take GLP-1s. It's hard to find things that GLP-1 doesn't positively impact in regards to longevity.
Edit: could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait generally? You've been doing it repeatedly and we've asked you many times not to.
I think the US should be more worried. Their govt makes it incredibly hard to course-correct (filibuster, gerrymandering, fptp, electoral college, supreme court etc)
https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart
Trends look better for China. Life expectancy already caught up.