[intended]

I think you’ve made an argument for free trade, but your examples and logic don’t refute the value of protectionism.

China is a ridiculously protectionist state - people in the west had theorized that the market would force China to more opennness and democracy back in the day.

China instead found a way to run a market with Chinese characteristics - a dual contract system where the English contract holds little power, knowledge transfer, a closed media environment and more.

It’s worked too. China suggests that some players can extract the benefits of free trade and protectionist policy.

[mardifoufs]

I totally realize that China is far from liberal but it has been much more prosperous and became a superpower because it has liberalized vast swaths of the economy. I guess it would have been better to say that it's doing better than India because it moved a hypothetical protectionism-free trade slider further to the free trade side. There are tons of smart decisions from China that also made the liberalization very successful, such as understanding the vital importance of foreign capital, access to the world's markets, infrastructure investment, and slowly building up knowledge instead of going all in "in house" too quickly.

Still, none of what has been accomplished in China could've been possible with very high tariffs, obsession in homegrown industry before acquiring expertise, and obsession with policies that have always failed but still sound good to the electorate. All of which are characteristic of India, Argentina, Egypt, etc. And I'd argue that China is better when it comes to free movement of trade than India even if it's much worst in almost every other type of freedom.

[unishark]

> China is a ridiculously protectionist state - people in the west had theorized that the market would force China to more opennness and democracy back in the day.

The Chinese government has almost completely lost control of its market. They can control (and profit massively from) very narrow things like blocking foreign servers on their internet (which happens to include our largest tech companies) but otherwise it is very much the wild west over there. The political system has chinese characteristics, but the wildfire of capitalism going in is just plain capitalism, and more so than in the US in some ways.

As for whether the government can survive, this is a complicated question but sooner or later an opposition group always defeats the rulers. I wound't write this ending off yet. Or ever, really.