[smsm42]

> i.e. does China's investment and push towards a controlled society actually come out ahead compared to if they didn't?

The same question people used to ask about USSR. USSR had it all - mass prison camps, massive industrialization programs, surveillance and terror state (of course, at different technology level), massive successes in some areas - like space technologies, unconditional love of all well-meaning people in the West, especially in academy and significant part of Hollywood - everything was there. Until USSR crumbled into dust. Turns out enslaving and oppressing people under the slogans of "most free society on the planet" is, after all, not sustainable, and free economy (even the semi-free one we're witnessing now) outperforms the socialist planned one. I don't think China would fare much better - though it may take a long time to see it, and sometimes it would seem like they have won - as was proclaimed many times by USSR fans over the course of 20th century.

[apatters]

On that note, an article was just posted on here about how Chinese companies are going bust left and right: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19858288

While many people have stopped believing this, it really is true that free economies outperform planned ones, and when the planned ones explode, they tend to explode spectacularly. The only mitigating counterpoint is that it's not clear how free the US and EU economies really are these days, as they've increasingly become dominated by large companies via market power, lobbying and regulatory capture.