why is there always pro-China messaging here and on Reddit? Every day there's another story about how China is eclipsing the West, but wake me up when the CCP changes.
China might be eating the world but the most obvious thing is the astroturfing.
Funny how much stuff you can build when you're not spending insane amounts of money bombing farmers in the Hindu Kush, achieving full-spectrum dominance over everyone, or catering to entrenched interests.
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.
What worries me more than “authoritarian model works”, is the isolation. Absolutely seriously: What enabled the terrors of collonialism was the lack of understanding of shared humanity between the sides. What happens when China is big, strong, different, ultra-nationalist and some factor kicks it out of the “peace is the most advantageous path forward” mode? Imagine the military and economic dominance of US, but with Chinese superiority ideals instead of liberal-democratic ones (and even with those plenty of harm has been caused).
I think they still need us to buy their stuff, though maybe less so than in the past. Many of the points the article is making are basically that they don't need to buy our stuff, but hasn't that always been the case? With a massive population and manufacturing base, and significant linguistic and technical barriers between them and the West, it's hardly surprising that they would build their own Google rather than importing ours.
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.
China has built its own enormous internal market—its own tourism, its own brands, its own everything. They've turned inward not from isolation but from self-sufficiency.
Not sure how the title matches with this line at all.
In any case, these kinds of analyses always seem really shallow and historically ignorant to me. I can totally buy the idea that China will become a dominant economic player in the world, if it isn't already. This seems like an obvious, borderline mundane observation to make.
What would be more insightful is an analysis of China and the West that factors in three big things:
1. How the unique aspects of America basically make it impossible for the the country to be in the position China was in during the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is to say, a total disaster, beset by civil wars, colonial acquisitions, invasions, on and on. No matter how much China outcompetes America, I don't think it will ever be in that sort of situation. The military and national security state, plus the sheer amount of personal firearms, pretty much guarantees IMO that the US is basically impregnable from outside military interventions. 19th century China had neither of these things. And so I think you're inevitably going to have, at worst, a multipolar world, if not a directly bipolar one.
2. More broadly, how the cultural dynamics of the West led to the Reformation, Wars of Religion, Renaissance, and Industrial Revolution and to the West being the dominant power in the first place. And more importantly, if those cultural trends are still active, even if they are somehow dormant. If you don't factor these in, your picture of history is extremely short-term and basically dependent on contemporary predictions of the future. (See: predictions of Japan in the 1980s.)
3. And more recently, how the "enemy" of the Soviet Union prompted the US to behave more competitively and feel pressured to perform. See, for example, the Space Race. I don't really get the sense that China is anywhere near occupying the same place in the American imagination right now, and so there isn't much of a competitive spirit. There seem to be rumblings of one developing in the last decade, but it's still not quite there. If it ever develops, certainly it's going to be a factor.
> Singapore, Dubai, Rwanda—they're all copying the Chinese model: authoritarian capitalism with good PR.
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.
>China went from burning coal directly to becoming the world's solar panel factory.
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
> The government we call authoritarian is delivering what Western democracies struggle to: stuff that actually works. Their infrastructure works. Extreme poverty collapsed. Life expectancy increased by 10 years. They can plan 20 years ahead while Western politicians can't plan past the next election.
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).
Europe only developed this way because of the immense ideological and moral pull the Soviet Union had over the populace.
Capital and the ruling classes feared revolutionary intent so much that they had no other choice than to give in and give people a good quality of life to try and stymie it. It's the Otto von Bismarck state welfare tactic.
Now that it's gone and revolutionary ideas have basically all but completely disappeared (China does not and probably will never have the same standing the Soviets did), they don't have to keep the façade up anymore. This is why everything has been decaying. Sooner or later all the 'advantages' and 'benefits' Europe has will wither away into nothingness.
> Walking through the ancient towns another reality hit me: China doesn't need us anymore. These towns were packed with only Chinese tourists, I counted maybe ten Westerners the whole week. No Starbucks, no McDonald's, no Western chains at all.
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.
While I don't deny China is a big economy with areas where it's leading. This article reads a bit like cheerleading, which is fine. It's just not the whole truth.
Also:
>prosperity without freedom, development without democracy, safety without expansive civil liberties.
Once Deng Xiaoping did his reforms and opening up, it removed much of the impediments that Mao's CCP caused, and China was able to develop super fast. But recently I am a little concerned that Xi Jinping's rule is a bit of a return to some Mao-style authoritarian principles that are likely to hamper growth.
* Economic growth slowed down significantly under Xi Jinping compared to his predecessor Hu Jintao. Also, while Xi handled the start of the Covid pandemic well, he sort of fumbled the recovery afterwards with too heavy-handed quarantine/daily testing policies.
* China has demonstrated that it's super good at AI stuff, publishing lots of papers, having extremely talented engineers at Deepseek, etc, but after Deepseek stunned the world with the R1 model, subsequent models got heavily censored and languished in relative obscurity.
* China continues to have a brain drain of talented scientists and engineers to the US and other parts of the world. A large proportion of the top talent at Google, OpenAI, xAI, Meta, etc, are Chinese-American.
* From my anecdotal experience, many young people in China feel helpless and unmotivated due to the hyper-competitive environment and lack of opportunities. It is common to find healthy young adults who would rather "lie flat" than work. Together with an extremely aging population due to the one-child policy, this does not bode well for the future.
Anyway, I just wish China would just continue opening up, namely to get rid of the great firewall. In the age of information it is lame that information flow in and out of the country is so restricted. On one hand, as this article points out, the rest of the world is ignorant of the advances in China. On the other hand, the Chinese people are also ignorant of many things outside.
> Singapore, Dubai, Rwanda—they're all copying the Chinese model: authoritarian capitalism
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.
I don't know much, so feel free to tell me if I'm wrong but a quick rebuttal of this article would point out how half of china's cities are sinking, their debt to GDP ratio was 300% before a GDP revision and they ignore international patents and intellectual property. I'm happy that China lifted their people out of poverty, though. Their achievements are certainly real.
Been there a few times. I see the skepticism in the comments and would suggest to just visit and see for yourself. Of course it won’t be the full picture but just check it out. It’s perfectly safe, and now easier than ever.
>Transportation? California approved high-speed rail in 2008 to link LA and San Francisco for $33 billion. Costs ballooned; there’s still no service. The U.K. canceled HS2’s northern leg after years of overruns. Berlin’s new airport opened almost a decade late and billions over budget. Meanwhile, China built 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail that runs at 350 km/h.
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.
I have a cognitive dissonance between valuing freedom and privacy and China's level of development (because of/in spite of limited freedom).
My hopes for China fall into 2 main camps:
- Measured increases in personal freedom. Restricting information serves to slow the viral spread of minority/non-mainstream opinions (i.e. limiting the reach of a vocal minority), but keeping the population from being exposed to "bad" information is only beneficial as long as the government is "good".
- Acknowledge/continue working on current issues (demographic issues, housing market, domestic consumption). The worst that can happen to a country is that they trick themselves with their own lies (a common trope in many films featuring non-Western countries).
Interested in hearing thoughts/rebuttals/additions on this.
Disclaimer: I am ethnically Chinese but grew up outside the country.
> A solar panel bench with wireless charging in a random small town in Yunnan anyone?
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?
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.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 63.5 ms ] threadI'd be interested to see something with more detail and citations. Or maybe even a rebuttal piece.
China might be eating the world but the most obvious thing is the astroturfing.
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.
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.
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
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.
Not sure how the title matches with this line at all.
In any case, these kinds of analyses always seem really shallow and historically ignorant to me. I can totally buy the idea that China will become a dominant economic player in the world, if it isn't already. This seems like an obvious, borderline mundane observation to make.
What would be more insightful is an analysis of China and the West that factors in three big things:
1. How the unique aspects of America basically make it impossible for the the country to be in the position China was in during the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is to say, a total disaster, beset by civil wars, colonial acquisitions, invasions, on and on. No matter how much China outcompetes America, I don't think it will ever be in that sort of situation. The military and national security state, plus the sheer amount of personal firearms, pretty much guarantees IMO that the US is basically impregnable from outside military interventions. 19th century China had neither of these things. And so I think you're inevitably going to have, at worst, a multipolar world, if not a directly bipolar one.
2. More broadly, how the cultural dynamics of the West led to the Reformation, Wars of Religion, Renaissance, and Industrial Revolution and to the West being the dominant power in the first place. And more importantly, if those cultural trends are still active, even if they are somehow dormant. If you don't factor these in, your picture of history is extremely short-term and basically dependent on contemporary predictions of the future. (See: predictions of Japan in the 1980s.)
3. And more recently, how the "enemy" of the Soviet Union prompted the US to behave more competitively and feel pressured to perform. See, for example, the Space Race. I don't really get the sense that China is anywhere near occupying the same place in the American imagination right now, and so there isn't much of a competitive spirit. There seem to be rumblings of one developing in the last decade, but it's still not quite there. If it ever develops, certainly it's going to be a factor.
The 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).
Capital and the ruling classes feared revolutionary intent so much that they had no other choice than to give in and give people a good quality of life to try and stymie it. It's the Otto von Bismarck state welfare tactic.
Now that it's gone and revolutionary ideas have basically all but completely disappeared (China does not and probably will never have the same standing the Soviets did), they don't have to keep the façade up anymore. This is why everything has been decaying. Sooner or later all the 'advantages' and 'benefits' Europe has will wither away into nothingness.
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.
Also: >prosperity without freedom, development without democracy, safety without expansive civil liberties.
So did the USSR in many places.
* 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.
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 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.
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?
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.