[finid]

Everything comes and goes. It's just the nature of things. When it's your time to lead the pack, you will, regardless of the cultural environment. Most of us (in the West) don't know it yet, but we're already in the Chinese Age.

How long will their time last?

The funny thing about the influence of culture on innovation is that when this country (USA) was rewriting the rules and breaking down boundaries this way and that way, we were sending minorities to jail like "AI WW" and generally compelling them to behave and know their place.

[CuriouslyC]

Empires are transient, and the more they try to control the people they rule, the more transient they become.

China has bet the farm on continual economic growth, and that worked for a while, but they're close to parity with the west now, so maintaining that rate of progress is going to become much more difficult. When the government fails to deliver continual rapid quality of life improvements, autocracy is going to become a major liability. They are going to be forced to either rapidly democratize, or become increasingly isolationist. I suspect that the government will push for the latter, though in the long run democratization is pretty much inevitable. The djinni is out of the bottle, and it's not going back.

This isn't to say that I see China collapsing per se, but there are some major speed bumps on the path to global domination.

[finid]

I agree that China will eventually become a democratic country, but that will even make it stronger, not weaker. China is just getting started, so they're far from collapsing.

[seanmcdirmid]

Ai Weiwei is not a minority. In fact, the only reason he is not in jail continuously is because his family is very powerful ("noble") in China.