[cmehdy]

China is five times the US in population. Given enough time, it can just throw people at problems and get there. Notwithstanding the fact that the research and academic works coming out of China, while still facing issues in quality on average, have still been rising in quantity and quality.

When the combined US+EU market is less than half the amount of people of your own economy, stumbling upon itself with regulations and inner struggles and disagreements, and you are the single most important builder of things in their world.. I'm not sure democracy is a prerequisite to be able to achieve domination eventually.

Sure, average quality of life still isn't on par with the EU or the US.. but then again, they've taken 600 million people out of extreme poverty in the last few decades, they're the single biggest current builder of nuclear power plants, they're developing their own space agency at a rapid pace, and are perfectly fine increasingly making major US businesses bend to their will (in tech, in sports, in the industry, and in bending America's cultural influence in the world through things like Hollywood), and they seriously lock down the innovation and profit so that it circulates internally first and foremost.

I'm not saying all these things for the fun of it: I'm from the EU and I live in Canada, so I'm both very much wanting the world to go towards the models that the EU and Canada are trying to achieve (as far as democracies strive to improve themselves, ever-so-slowly sometimes), but I'm also pretty keenly aware of how small those players actually can be when compared to a behemoth with a very long history, a critical mass, and willing to make any necessary concessions to dominate.

You don't really need 750 million people when you have 1.6 billion in the first place.

[foobarian]

> China is five times the US in population. Given enough time, it can just throw people at problems and get there

I feel that for at least the last century, you need to think of the US population for the purposes of talent pool sizing as more or less the entire world because of its focus on liberty and opportunity. Consider how many accomplished scientists and inventors came from other countries (including China) for this reason. The US has enjoyed a very privileged position of being able to skim the cream of the crop in this way.

[woah]

We don’t allow them in any more

[wyclif]

False. In 2015, 1,051,031 resident visas were issued to foreigners in the USA.

[raverbashing]

So, in 2015, and what was the wait time for those

The bar gets higher every day, and it's a hassle a lot of people are not willing to go through

[wyclif]

Classic moving of the goalposts IMO. 2015 was the last year I could get reliable data for. Wait time? What standards are you basing your comments on and what countries are you comparing the USA to? By any reasonable standard, the US is still very pro-immigration and pro-entrepreneur.

[raverbashing]

> Wait time?

So you don't know how long it takes to get an H1B and you want to talk about "reasonable standards"? That's funny

Getting a work visa to pretty much anywhere in the EU or Canada (or maybe even Australia) is quicker than an H1B.

[booleandilemma]

Given enough time, it can just throw people at problems and get there

I don’t think it works that way. We’re not talking about building pyramids, or a great wall. It’s not a simple labor issue or China and India would already be winning.

A corrupt authoritarian country can’t innovate at the speed of a free and democratic one.

[adrianN]

Or it can innovate a lot faster, because you don't need to convince a majority that your line of research is okay to pursue. For example research with stem cells.

[yostrovs]

Did China become a leader in stem cell research and what did it come up with in that research?

[cmehdy]

Pyramids and the great wall were pre-fossil fuels, electricity, and internet. Any useful research on sci-hub can be available to a person with half a mind in China. The Chinese space program has made leaps from being the third country in the world with a successful crewed space program in only 2003, and now on their trajectory to have a permanent space station in 2022 - only 19 years later.

Progress is heavily non-linear, particularly so in the last few hundred years, and very unevenly distributed due to various factors (geography, wars, resources, population sizes, etc). The way European and even North American powers developed even 70 years back is not a direct match to how countries develop now.

But you're right that it's not just a labour issue: it's also an energy issue, for power (which enabled hundred-fold ROIs compared to human work, even slave work) and materials construction (which already occurs in the countries you mentioned). And on that note, the planned construction of nuclear power plants in China is enormous[0] (including new technologies like EPR which work well already there while they're lagging behind in my home country of France) and by the end of that their total nuclear throughput will be higher than France[1]. And renewables are also rising at a fantastic pace there too.

Now there's the current (and soon to be dated) GDP/added-value definition of "winning" from the west. Well, even there it's a steady improvement for China (more so than for India, that's for sure): over two-thirds of foreign executives were already saying Chinese companies were as innovative or more than their companies by 2014[2] and the time to market on their internal market is very different from the rest of the world due in part to entirely different approaches to strict internal processes, which leads to a very different approach to what's "new". As noted in the same article and in my previous comment, while the quality of things isn't quite on par with what the US or the EU are accustomed to, it's good enough for a market that is more than twice the population of the two aforementioned. And by sticking to that metric, one can easily say that what WeChat does in China is the wet dream of basically most of the biggest US tech companies.

I do have many doubts about what will happen to the country and its population as the middle class grows and starts asking questions and wanting a better quality of life and, you know, perhaps want no more autocratic regimes and less corruption. Perhaps that's more a hope of mine rather than a pragmatic prediction though.

I'm not sure what definitions of "winning" and "innovate" you are using, and I am curious to hear about the places where the country completely fails to innovate or "win" (this is not a sarcastic comment, I'm genuinely curious), because it's getting the world handed to it on a platter these last few years.

I don't wish for the EU to emulate in any way some of the terrible things occurring in China, and I hope that the ideals of the Schengen space and practical EU protections (that I very much cherish) will be one of those things that spread to the world eventually, but I'm not seeing a fantastic amount of "winning" happening in our democratic countries lately, from one side of the Atlantic (Brexit, rise of extremes, EU issues in Poland or Hungary, lack of collective weight on major decisions, etc) or on the other side.

edit: links, sorry about that.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268154/number-of-planned...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country

[2] https://outline.com/szPNha (MIT Sloan Management Review)

[visarga]

> the middle class grows and starts asking questions and wanting a better quality of life and, you know, perhaps want no more autocratic regimes and less corruption

I think the Coronavirus disaster has shown that China can be more efficient than all democratic countries where it counts. A serious blow to the prestige of democracy vs autocracy.

[sho]

> China can be more efficient than all democratic countries

Not all democratic countries. I live in Thailand, which is at least technically a democracy, and the virus has been completely extinguished here. The crackdown was harsh - a month of curfew! - but it worked, and the public was largely on board. Life is back to normal here, with the addition of masks, for which there is 100% compliance - I just don't understand how the US acts against its own interests in that regard. The virus has been crushed. And it's the same in Singapore, after a couple of hiccups. Hell, Thailand is re-opening to tourism!

China isn't 100% autocracy, anyway. There's a very very large gap between China and, say, North Korea, or even Soviet Russia. You can definitely make the case though that the "pure democracy free for all" model like the USA, with its totally unrestricted (and possibly harmful in the age of social media) free speech, has certainly lost if not prestige, then at least the status of the model of governance other countries should aspire to. I would say the USA's handling of COVID19 has been a big wake-up call to pretty much every other democracy of what can happen when "freedom" goes too far.

[fakedang]

Calling Thailand and Singapore democracies, even if they like to call themselves that, is like calling Russia a democracy, or calling Saudi Arabia a positive agent for women's rights.

[sho]

Come on, that's a bit much. They're not Norway, but they're pretty far from Russia.

And for what it's worth, I'd call America's money-driven system pretty far from the world's best democracy as well.

[mkolodny]

Check out the 60 Minutes video "Whistleblowers silenced by China could have stopped global coronavirus spread" [0], and then see if you still feel that way.

[0] https://youtu.be/pEQcvcyzQGE

[MrYellowP]

This isn't accurate. It wasn't "China" who silenced people, it was a local official who eventually got removed and punished. The now deceased doctor, who wanted to report it, got officially apologized.

Don't buy into the western anti-china propaganda.

Here's an official timeline: https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/29-06-2020-covidtimelin...

I clearly remember back when this whole thing started and how pretty much all of the western countries bashed on china endlessly for no actually sane reason. It's what made me start digging into it. This whole mess, we live in now, wouldn't be a thing if china-bashing wasn't the norm in western countries and if they, the respective governments, instead had acted in the interest of their respective people. Which they didn't.

[nl]

Oh please.

The world got plenty of notice and the countries listening acted successfully.

Even the US enacted travel bans which - if they had followed up and kept working towards suppression of the virus - would have been a great start. Instead the US sacrificed it's gains to political games and now is seeing what happens.

The whistleblowers in China shouldn't have been suppressed. But there was plenty of notice early enough to act.

[Bombthecat]

Heck, china closed a whole county, and people where still like: no big deal!

China! Where peoples live are worth nothing...

[iso947]

> successful crewed space program in only 2003, and now on their trajectory to have a permanent space station in 2022 - only 19 years later

Russia put a man in space in 1961, and Mir was 25 years later (following several Salyut stations)

19 years doesn’t seem that great

[cmehdy]

China didn't bankrupt itself in the process of a space race, and they're not doing it during the cold war but just because they know they can. If China put a 'cold war' attitude into doing something, you can bet that this would have been done in less time. Just look at how quickly rudimentary hospitals were built for their covid outbursts.

[divbzero]

> You don't really need 750 million people when you have 1.6 billion in the first place.

Why not have both?

China should in no way have to be “Western” to be trusted internationally. But they could embrace the opportunity to be even more open and generous of a society than they have been in the recent past. They’re certainly strong enough for it.

A few things I would personally love to see:

– More transparent and consistent application of laws

– Celebrate and protect all Chinese of all diversities, not just the majority who hold the most power

– Avoid taking nationalism to an extreme

The second and third especially are serious mistakes other nations (e.g. Britain, Japan, America) have made in recent history. It would be a gift to see China avoid the same.

[arrosenberg]

One and two are basically hallmarks of western Liberalism, so this seems kind of contradictory. To my knowledge, the only historical Chinese government that we would consider Liberal is the current Taiwanese government, and even then that's a fairly recent development (30-ish years). It's not clear how the current regime could get there without wholesale changes in the power structure.

[nine_k]

Careful, this sounds close to a suggestion to change China's leadership.

Instead, they recently tightened the Party control over businesses, less Deng Xiaoping style, more Soviet style.

[free_rms]

The thing is, your perception of them on these issues is very much colored by the fact that they're not western. It permeates all coverage of them from western sources.

[MrYellowP]

It's actually 850 million people.

"China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 0.7 percent in 2015"

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China

I felt like 250 million people difference in accuracy was worth pointing out, but of course this also covers "600 million in the last decades".

[cmehdy]

Thanks for the more precise information. It's indeed very much worth pointing it out when a "slight difference in accuracy" in my statement is a population equivalent to 80%+ of the US(!).

[shynrou]

I wouldn't dare to call some one with an income of 60$ per month not poor...

[MrYellowP]

It's a misleading way of measuring poverty. In fact, it is irrelevant how many units of currency you earn, as long as your units of currency cover your basic needs plus a bit.

Sixty units of currency are a lot of money when rent costs you ten and bread costs you one.

In Bulgaria, most things are half the price. Food and rent are damn cheap for someone who earns money in euros.

They earn half as many units of currency compared to people where I live. That's an amount of currency with which I could never live where I live now, but there it would last.

[rottingfruit]

I don’t know I hear things like with ___s population they can just throw people at the problem. Has that historically been true though? Why then have China and India not always led the way as super powers in the first place?

[coldtea]

>Has that historically been true though? Why then have China and India not always led the way as super powers in the first place?

Yes. Who said they hadn't?

For the biggest part of history, until Europe got forward after kickstarting the industrial revolution (along with the help of colonization and the exploiting of the New World), China was the #1 economy worldwide, and quite more advanced in many ways than the rest of the world.

E.g. in the Song dynasty (900-1200 A.D): "These [policies] made China a global leader, leading some historians to call this an "early modern" economy many centuries before Western Europe made its breakthrough".

1500 A.D.: In 1500, China was the largest economy in the world, followed closely by India, both with estimated GDP's of approximately $100 billion. France was a distant third at approximately 18 billion, followed closely by Italy and Germany. What is now the United Kingdom ranked 10th, at barely one quarter the output of France (Figure 1).

Heck, China was prosperous all the way back to 20-100 B.C ("Technological innovations, such as the wheelbarrow, paper and a seismograph, were invented during this period")

"China's economy led its European counterpart by leaps and bounds at the start of the Renaissance. China was so far ahead, in fact, that economic historian Eric L. Jones once argued that the Chinese empire "came within a hair's breadth of industrializing in the fourteenth century.""

https://i.insider.com/586e8834ee14b6507e8b5b45?width=1000&fo...

https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-chinese-economy-1...

[AnimalMuppet]

> "China's economy led its European counterpart by leaps and bounds at the start of the Renaissance. China was so far ahead, in fact, that economic historian Eric L. Jones once argued that the Chinese empire "came within a hair's breadth of industrializing in the fourteenth century.""

China had an iron industry earlier than that - 12th century, IIRC. It was all starting - more iron resulting in iron tools all over the place, process improvements, and so on. But then some bureaucrats (mandarins, which I think is the same thing) noticed that some of the "wrong" people were getting rich in all this, and the government forcibly shut it all down in the name of preserving social order.

That's one of the strengths of America - more than anywhere else in the world, if you have the right idea, it doesn't matter if you're the "wrong" person.

[rabidrat]

America has that story, but it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. America may not have "class" restrictions like other places, but it sure does have "race" restrictions. And even when the wrong people manage to make it, they (as a group anyway) will still have it taken away from them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre

[star-trek-fleet]

There were a national debate on economy centered on the circulation of iron and salt. A representative work is "盐铁论” discussions on iron and salt.

Chinese civilization peaked in tang (in terms of international influence) and later song (in terms of tech and culture).

Then it's a steady declination till the end of Qing.

Ancient China was quite liberal and diverse even in modern standards. But the history took a reverse turn to more totalitarian direction. (China never practiced authoritarian regime, even today, people just cannot admit or bother to learn the nuances of modern China political system, I am so very much disappointed there is no modern day Tocqueville on China, what a pity!)

Xi's approach is fairly conventional in terms of Chinese tradition. But it has swapped the Confucius core with a blended scientific core through learning from Communism. This is a dangerous direction, as there is quite a risk of how to continue this tradition across generations, history has shown that declination and degradation is inevitable within 2-300 years time period. It will be interesting to see how Xi handles his succession. It might be quite disastrous. But it also has a lot of institutional safety backup.

Who knows! To me, this is the single most political affair in the next 10-20 years.

Xi is not a dictator, his life experience does not lend the ambition, nor his power can dominate the check and balance in China. Whoever labels xi a dictator is fooling his audience for some unspeakable purpose.

[1] https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%9B%90%E9%93%81%E8%AE%BA

[bradleykingz]

For a person that's not a dictator, Xi sure does have a lot of dictatorial tendencies.

> check and balance in China

Do tell.

Last I checked, China was a one-party state and doesn't have the same judiciary-executive freedom that typically defines 'checks and balances'

[sho]

> Do tell.

Well, he does need to be voted Secretary by the Central Committee. The change that was made recently was to remove term limits - but in theory he can still be voted out. Weak sauce I know compared to judicial oversight but hey, you asked.

I agree with the GP that labeling Xi a "dictator" is hyperbole. I wouldn't even say he's as entrenched as Putin.

[justicezyx]

For any behavior you believe Xi is doing that showcase dictatorship, I can guarantee that the popular support is secured beforehand, in proportional to the impact of the actions.

Check and balanced exit, as one example, in the ways of how policies are executed between different branches and sectors.

Like if Xi wants to do some thing, the functioning branch has a great deal of influence, as the government officials are not refreshed between different government terms. Like many of Xi's policy can be effectively nullified, if the policy really were not effectively mobilizing the functioning units.

One might fancy that Xi can install his own men that is so effective that the above check is rendered ineffective. That's possible, but it seems even in the imperial era, a sane emperor was not able to do that [1]. Nor I see any evidence that Xi had acquired any such superhuman power.

These are unfortunately not as visible as western systems.

But again, I can only state qualitatively, in the sense that the check and balance is so much more effective than what a lot of people imagine. I am not an expert that can give you a systematic description of the details. I once again lament the missing of a modern day Tocqueville...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1587,_a_Year_of_No_Significa...

[AnimalMuppet]

> Whoever labels xi a dictator is fooling his audience for some unspeakable purpose.

So anyone who claims Xi is a dictator has evil motives? No room for honest disagreement? The facts are not only clear and unambiguous, but also so widely spread that everyone knows? Nonsense. "I'm right, and anyone who disagrees is not only wrong but evil" is a very cheap rhetorical trick. You sound like...

Well, you sound like the American left. And the American right. And the Republican Party. And the Democratic Party. What you don't sound like, though, is a reasonable person having a reasonable discussion, who has evidence on his side.

[cmehdy]

European powers were fairly dominant in the world when the industrial revolution started there. The causation link isn't clear to me (if one caused the other or vice-versa - I'd love to hear from people who know better), but the fact of the matter is that local energy sources could be used (coal, as early as the 1700s) so the benefits were clear and local first, and a huge jump in progress ensued across those economies over the last few centuries.

Transitioning to less "dangerous" fossil fuels happened once the economies were already pretty robust and machines were doing the work of hundreds of men at once, because countries got richer and as their quality of life improved they increasingly walked away from dangerous stuff (the deaths per TWh of coal and brown coal are horrifying[0] and unions and education of the population surely had their role to play in driving change in the way those countries dealt with fossil fuels). Europe then increasingly moved away from coal (not quite done with it though: Germany is still so anti-nuclear that they are the second biggest users behind Russia and iirc the first next importer of coal-based energy - from Russia), but that's the kind of luxury one can afford when the economy is already in decent shape. That's also in part why, while currently China is the single largest producer of coal in the world (to sustain its growth year-on-year), they're also pretty aware that they've got to switch pretty fast to something better (i.e. nuclear) because the honeymoon won't last forever (and I have no doubt that a few generations there will pay a high price in the future for that - cue social unrest down the road).

So at the very least, the idea that we can "throw people at the problem" isn't entirely devoid of sense when you consider how many people in Europe dedicated their lives to this brand-new energy-dense coal for a couple generations, and in doing so definitely sacrificed their health and lives in exchange for rapid social progress (that they might or might not have benefited from..).

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

[sverhagen]

I've been wondering, is Joe Biden popularizing "the fact of they matter is..."? (Again? As I appreciate he probably didn't invent it, but he sure uses it a lot.) I now suddenly see it everywhere...

[mathraki]

A tradeoff that I find fascinating is that of democracy vs authoritarian gov't. It's the question of our days.

I've come to the conclusion that a well functioning authoritarian government (like China's) has many short term advantages:

- very efficient in redirecting resources as needed

- the top concerns of the state (e.g. beat COVID, create a domestic semiconductor industry out of thin air) are addressed very efficently

- no politics or stupid "check and balances" to stall momentum (e.g compare to how many of Trump's orders, even for Tiktok, were at least temporarily halted by federal judges)

HOWEVER- to have a well functioning authoritarian government you need a strongman at the top (Xi, Putin etc). This is my own anecdotal estimate, but I'd say there is at least a 25% change you get someone that wants to hold on to power and willing to sacrifice their people's well being in order to do that (e.g. see China's Great Leap forward and resulting famine [1])

So you get 1, 2 3 leadership successions that work out and prosperity keeps growing... but how far will your luck take you? Even if 3/4 leaders are 'good' chances of having 5 leaders all good are 23%, and to have 10 successful successions your chances are .75^10=5%.

In the long run, the authoritarian regime will collapse under its own weight. In the short term it's kicking ass. Your call which one you want to pick.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

[AnimalMuppet]

In China, this is called the "bad emperor" problem. They've seen it several times.

[pritovido]

I have lived in China. Authoritarian is way worse. Putin is not authoritarian in the degree that China is.

It has lots of disadvantages:

- You can loose everything you have very fast, including your live and the live of your children, and of course your money or your home. There are kidnappings in China.

-Your food is not safe. The air you breath is not safe and if you try to do something, let alone measure it, you will get into problems. They can kill you and make you disappear.

- Nothing is true. Have they beaten COVID? You believe so because they tell you so. But the party controls media so you can believe as well in Santa.

-The State in China is one of the least efficient things you can think of, and extremely corrupt. The only thing they are good at is propaganda.

-Lots of politics in China. Have you seen all the people at the CCP? Lots of factions there fighting for power. Those guys are killing each other or pointing fingers at other factions and sending them to jail with each new scandal.

IMO, "check and balances" is not stupid. It is one of the best inventions the West have created.

Coming back has made me realize how valuable is what we have in the West. And how spoiled people are taking for granted what took thousands of years to develop.

[hungryhobo]

To be fair, the same can be said for a lot of under developed democratic countries.

[lawrenceyan]

Exactly. Monarchies and dictatorships like you say always inevitably implode because no matter how great the current person in power is, there's nothing you can do to guarantee the quality of their successors.

And it's precisely because no system of checks and balances exist that ensures once you roll badly on a succession, that whoever ends up gaining control is able to so quickly destroy whatever has previously been built up.

The only way to truly ensure long term growth and stability, is to build up a robust system, independent of any individual, that has checks and balances set in place.

[raverbashing]

Also your "strongman" has to not be stupid and keep the economy running, otherwise you get a "great leader" telling their farmers to turn equipment into scrap metal (amongst other mis-scientific advice) and you get a Great Leap into Famine (as you referenced)

[watwut]

I think that this describes imaginary authoritarian country rather then real one. It is not like all policies of authoritarian leaders worked as intended. They don't, the ranks under twist them to unrecognizable.

Also, authoritarian leader willing to sacrifice well being of subjects is not the exception, it is the norm. You can't be authoritarian leader without such willingness.

Also, checks and balances are not stupid. The difference is that stalling of Trump orders happened in the open for well defined reasons.

[AmericanChopper]

China, in its current form, simply doesn’t have the potential to compete with the US in this way. It is a walled garden of corruption, who’s leaders will go to any lengths to retain total control of.

Indian on the other hand, given enough time, could come to challenge the US’s economic domination.