[jollybean]

Russia looked unstoppable from the outside, but from the inside it was crumbling.

China is not crumbling. They don't have a controlled economy in the direct way that the Russians did, and as long as they have economic prosperity ... they'll do just fine.

I don't see them screwing that up.

It doesn't matter that much who's diplomats look like fools, it matters what the GDP is, how powerful the military is, how much control and leverage they have.

China probably will never do well on 'soft power' but they're going to probably do just fine with 'regular power' for the forseeable future.

[skissane]

China faces some big challenges moving in to the future.

One is the demographic challenge of a declining population. Most Western countries face a similar challenge of low births, but many of them significantly counteract it through mass immigration; China however doesn't have that and shows no signs of being open to introducing it.

Another is that many people will put up with an authoritarian system as long as they see it producing high-levels of economic growth, but it is unlikely that China can sustain those high levels forever, and people may prove less willing to put up with the lack of freedom in worse economic times.

Another is that while China is good at playing technological catch-up it still hasn't demonstrated much capacity to produce genuinely original technological innovations. And here there is the argument that open societies have an inherent advantage in producing those innovations over authoritarian societies such as China. If that is true, then that is going to give the US and its allies a permanent economic advantage over China.

These challenges are not going to be the immediate downfall of the CCP. But in another 30 or 40 years?

[jollybean]

China is beyond playing 'catch up'. They might not be making the world's best software or jet engines, but they are making their own innovations in a wide variety of areas.

I don't think they will ever become the export powerhouse like the US, but we will see them move up the chain.

A lot of the low-level R&D in products already comes from China.

Also - the Chinese will put up with authoritarian culture because 1) they look at it entirely differently 2) they've never known anything else and especially 3) the surveillance of the CCP is orwellian. They will never let any idea challenge their status. The Chinese population at large will never have the opportunity to explore any alternative but what is told to them. Within that bubble, most are 'fine with it'.

Frankly, so long as China tried to have some kind of independendent judiciary and weren't putting people in prison for their ethnicity ... or kind of following the Singapore model I think the 'Rest of the World' would have no problems. And of course, if they weren't grabbing chunks of international waters as their own.

[skissane]

> China is beyond playing 'catch up'. They might not be making the world's best software or jet engines, but they are making their own innovations in a wide variety of areas.

Can you point to some specific examples of significant technological innovations created in China in recent years? Or technology areas in which China is the world leader?

There are still a lot of areas in which China is playing "catch-up" – semiconductor manufacturing (Taiwan doesn't count), aviation (China wants to challenge the Airbus-Boeing duopoly with Comac, but Comac is still a fair way behind both), just to give a couple of examples. What is an example of an area in which China has the technological lead?

[jollybean]

5G, consumer finance and marketplaces, AI for many applications including traffic automation, high speed rail etc..

In some areas, they may not be so far ahead in key tech, but they are further ahead in operationalising it.

California can't build a single fast train, while China is laying down more rail than anyone in history in a very short period of time.

Soon they will start building commercial aircraft and wipe out Boeing and Airbus in everything but domestic markets.

The only two areas I think they will have difficult is with chips, and jet engines.

For most other things, the 'product' and 'operation' is just as much or more important than the 'key research'.

It doesn't matter if the US researchers 'published the paper' if China can take it to market to the 'rest of the world' 10x more quickly.

[skissane]

> California can't build a single fast train, while China is laying down more rail than anyone in history in a very short period of time.

The US has had high-speed rail since the 1960s (Metroliner service, now the Acela Express), in the same decade that the technology was introduced in Japan and France. The failure of the technology to see further adoption in the US is due to politics, economics, competition from alternative transport modes, etc, not due to any purely technological issues. China's lead in implementation of high-speed rail is due to a political decision to invest in deploying it, not because China has any significant lead in the underlying technology.

> Soon they will start building commercial aircraft and wipe out Boeing and Airbus in everything but domestic markets.

Comac hasn't wiped Airbus and Boeing out yet. That is surely their aim but time will tell whether they actually manage to achieve it. Their main customer base is Chinese airlines, who will follow the CCP’s instructions in buying local. Comac will likely have some success in Africa and parts of Asia, but is unlikely to challenge Airbus and Boeing's lock on major first-world air carriers. The US is unlikely to allow US airlines to buy from Comac, and will encourage allied governments to apply the same policy.

[throwaway2048]

its dangerous to assume that somehow the natural state of people is to "not put up with the lack of freedom".

That was the entire lie peddled with respect to opening trade with china from the west to begin with, and look at the results.