[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.

[fakedang]

Yeah, LHL or Prayuth-chan Ocha actively subverting elections, hindering the opposition, preventing gatherings, sitting in bed with the military, all signs of a very healthy democracy in either country right?

Singapore can be as bad as Russia - it's just that if they were as bad, nobody would bother to stay along in that tiny island. Thailand is like Russia to Thai folks - recent protests are just evidence of that.

America isn't perfect, but at least you get to have an opposition. Last time the opposition found a reasonable and charismatic leader, we know what the king did in Thailand (it was his sister in the opposition).

[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...

[zepto]

China didn’t close a whole country.

They prevented people traveling from Wuhan to the rest of China but did not prevent people from traveling from Wuhan to the rest of the world.

During this time, they, and the WHO were saying that there was no evidence of human-to-human contagion.

You do the math.

[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.