[chillacy]

China has been releasing padded GDP numbers for the past 15 years. Many have doubted the true economic growth. Yet now magically they're the top economic competitor to the United States and being taken seriously as a threat to global leadership?

There is clear evidence of the virus being taken care of, so I'm pretty sure if numbers are off, they're off in the same way GDP is padded, and not orders of magnitude off.

> this is a scenario where having a dictator is advantageous to having an inefficient collection of bumbling democracies

Yes, and I'd go further and say it's not just democracies and dictatorships but cultures of individualism and collectivism. It's no coincidence that east asia has done so well (South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, Singapore) compared to the US and much of Europe.