[secondaryacct]

I live in China, I think the best way to summarise everything we do at all level is: the end justifies the means.

Need to seize power ? Murder all members of the former power. Need to make poor peasants rich middle class ? Build entire cities, put them there, and done. Need to build a metro station ? Take the land, build it. Need to make Hong Kong a more physically integrated part of the country ? Build a gigantic bridge to Zuhai even if nobody actually need to use it.

The problem ofc is that sometimes the means is more costly than the benefit of the end result, and also that the goal of the end result is never debated, but I suppose that will change eventually, once we've incurred too high a cost for too little a benefit overall.

[mmaunder]

In China, authority overcomes any friction and drives a project forward. In the US there is no authority and there is no common purpose or enemy. So thousands of self interested parties abuse the system in a very time consuming way.

If a major war was to break out, that would provide powerful common purpose and mountains would be moved in weeks, as history has shown. Same would apply in the case of a major environmental catastrophe.

Encapsulating innovation inside a corporation is the one way in the US to create a common purpose and shield a group from bureaucratic capture.

[nicbou]

The risk with the first method is that if the authority is wrong, no one can correct its course. One unlucky dice roll and you have 30 years of a dangerously incompetent maniac. Some will only judge such countries by their lucky rolls.

While a war unites a nation, it’s offset by the waste and destruction it creates. The cold war didn’t build more school and hospitals. All those resources went elsewhere, with the occasional dividend for civilians.

Mountains do get moved quickly when you sign blank cheques, but at a greater cost, with more waste and corruption. We put way too much faith in crash programs.

[karpierz]

I think this is why authoritarian governments can be more effective at economic growth when they're behind; they just follow the path that a more economically advanced power did, but with more focus and less concern for individual welfare. Hence China's rapid industrialization.

If that's true, then it'd fall apart when the central authority either becomes too inept or corrupt and the path to follow becomes less clear. Essentially, when the low hanging fruit is gone, the corruption/inepts of the authority would become clear.

[kingkawn]

The idea that working people weren’t ruthlessly exploited in the West’s industrial development is a historical fiction.

[nwah1]

Indeed. Quite a lot of Chinese slave labor was used.

[whimsicalism]

Sure, like how when the US let a million people die from a pandemic and China followed along by... averting what would have been 3-4 million deaths.

[seanmcdirmid]

If China only had higher standards for its wet markets and disallowed the wild trade all together, this whole pandemic would probably never have happened. At some point, Chinese medicine (which the wild animal trade supports) is doing much more harm than good (if pseudo medicine does any good at all).

[secondaryacct]

Yes what s ironic is that they now try to push traditional medecine as a remedy caused by a virus maybe originating from abusive use of traditional medicine material.

However now I think they just fucked up at the lab, importing bats from all over Asia as a mad rush towards cataloguing everything. The end, then, justified the means and safety was secondary.

Whatever hypothesis anyway, this tendency we have in China only to care about the goal, will end up in tears. Taiwan is prob our next fuckup.

[nicoburns]

My understanding is that the lab studying coronaviruses situated in close proximity to the wet market is the much more likely source than the wet market itself. And as labs in western countries have had similar leaks (see for example Foot & Mouth disease in the UK), I'm not sure we can really blame the Chinese.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

> more waste and corruption.

Does the waste and corruption cost more than the checks and balances though?

Looking at government IT projects, it feels like the overhead and paperwork make everything 10x more expensive, and taking a risk that some of the projects will end up "stolen" would still be cheaper. Especially if particularly egregious cases of corruption would be prosecuted after the fact.

[dotancohen]

  > Same would apply in the case of a major environmental catastrophe.

I disagree. The current major environmental catastrophe is unfolding right before our eyes. But because there is a lag of years between cause (positive and negative) and effect, the United States has been an example of how to do absolutely nothing substantial.

Sure, when earthquakes level bridges the US pulls out the shovels and starts collectively digging. But mention climate change and suggest that V8 daily drivers might need to change their habits, and they double down on hurting their progressive neighbors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgT1Sjo6u34

(I'd never actually encoutered this video before, I just googled "rolling coal" and saw that the title mentioned Tesla so clicked it.)

[unfocussed_mike]

> I disagree. The current major environmental catastrophe is unfolding right before our eyes. But because there is a lag of years between cause (positive and negative) and effect, the United States has been an example of how to do absolutely nothing substantial.

Right. This is a major failure of US and British culture in particular: the failure to understand how to grasp future exponential disastrous consequences and the exponential impact of our small individual actions in combatting them.

At the beginning of the Covid pandemic I spent a lot of time trying to explain to people that "but it's been weeks and there's only been a few hundred cases" is not a sufficient guide to what is going to come or how to respond to it.

Trying to urge people that they should be more concerned when they have not been taught about things like survivorship bias, the small-world experiment, have never heard of grains of rice or wheat on a chessboard, and were so rushed through school biology that they've missed key demonstrations of exponential growth, etc., is very difficult.

It was not long before we had people and even politicians saying that people like us were over-blowing things when we worried about Y2K, not out of any wise retrospective assessment of real risk but because "after all that, nothing really bad happened". And that is before we in the UK get to the B word.

Basically people need to see real world consequences for themselves or for those they love before they are galvanised into action, and then they galvanise themselves into action in part by blaming those people who tried to warn them and were not listened to, for failing to act pre-emptively to save them.

Edit to add: I don't mean to say that other cultures don't fail at imagining consequences. And indeed in the Covid situation it might be that some of the cultures that did significantly better had more exposure to SARS or bird flu and learned from that. But there is a general lack of cultural understanding of the risks of severe outcomes in the UK and USA

[raldi]

The common purpose is that we're about to ruin the planet's climate if we don't allow more people to voluntarily live in cities and live less car-dependent lifestyles but still we prohibit apartment buildings in many urban neighborhoods and can't build transit projects anymore.

[seanmcdirmid]

The USA has an adversarial political system: half the people associate with Democrats, half associate with Republicans. But in China, you are either for or against the CPC, and being against it almost means being a traitor. The other political parties exist just for appearances. Unity then is just the default.

[dataexporter]

I don't think a country like the US is capable of making any concrete decisions anymore. America's response to COVID-19 is an example of that.

[myth2018]

> Same would apply in the case of a major environmental catastrophe

I used to believe in that. After COVID-19, not anymore.

[a0-prw]

If a major war was to break out, the only mountains there would be, would be mountains of dead.

[taylorhou]

Most people in general have a short term cost/benefit analysis period. What China seemingly does different is they have 10, 20, 50+ year plans which in the time horizon of their multi-thousand year history even seems short term.

Your example of the bridge may seem like no one uses it today but most likely in the future, it will be used and the scale will tip towards it being vastly beneficial compared to its cost.

When countries like the USA have an entire history (not including native americans) of ~300 years, planning anything for 30 years out seems relatively crazy in comparison.

All about perspective.

[Retric]

Trying to use a 50 year plan is also a weakness. Technologies developed between now and then will make many goals obsolete before their finished.

China the county younger than the US. Linking the history as a monolithic entity is really propaganda more than anything else. They are sure trying to create a culturural identity across a country with multiple cultures and languages.

[technobabbler]

> Trying to use a 50 year plan is also a weakness. Technologies developed between now and then will make many goals obsolete before their finished.

It's not that simple. If something changes within the 50 years (and it certainly will), they can pivot away and work on something else.

It's more that they have a relatively unified, authoritarian government with absolute power and no external checks and balances.

At our other extreme, we have a two-party deadlock stretching back decades, and every major policy gets turned back after 4-8 years when the other party regains power. It's impossible to plan or build for the future that way.

We used to be able to send people to the moon, develop nuclear power, build interstates and dams, win not just wars but hearts and minds, rebuild Germany and Japan... and now... we can't even evacuate Afghanistan, can't stop our citizens from being so pissed off they storm the capitol, can't do anything about climate change, can't have a sane discussion about educational curricula, can't maintain infrastructure, can't keep our people off the streets, can't deal with a pandemic...

We've become good at one thing and one thing only: allowing private actors to optimize for massive short-term profits at the expense of society and the future. That's no way to run a country. We've turned citizens into gladiators fighting over scraps.

Not saying we should emulate Chinese authoritarianism, but having a national vision lasting more than one election cycle isn't a bad thing. Being able to unite a country behind a major social project isn't a bad thing. Being able to even THINK of a country as a country, instead of warring factions, isn't a bad thing.

[Retric]

Pivoting away still costs the initial investment. Creating canals seemed like an obvious win being a useful technology for hundreds of years which justified extreme investments. Until suddenly rail took over in a relative blink of the eye.

Authoritarianism tends to efficiently solve the wrong problems which results in an overall inefficient system. Private actors aren’t limited to only optimizing for today. Going to collage is a great example of long term optimization as is getting a 30 year mortgage etc. The difference is simply one of scale where private actors may not optimize the global problem, but global optimization is really difficult.

[technobabbler]

Private actors optimizing for their local maximum is in and of itself a sort of inefficiency.

In any case, it doesn't have to be an either-or situation (and arguably shouldn't be). For most of the last century we were able to juggle private needs with public works, using private talent to cooperatively tackle problems of national scale.

It was only in the last 2-3 decades that we really stopped believing in the country, and the government became increasingly dysfunctional. Then the last 5-10 years we really started circling the drain. I don't know what happened. Some of it looks to me like deliberate sabotage, a concerted effort to decrease public faith in government so that deregulation can benefit the elite. Some of it just looks like sheer incompetence.

Maybe it's just the natural end of our golden age. We've hit the limits of the sort of problems our system can reliably tackle, while the nationalists are still on the upward trajectory -- for now. China is especially scary because they've managed to invent a whole new sort of capitalism hybridized with nationalism-authoritarianism. It has the hallmarks of a free market at the lower levels, but the government has the final word on any business and can nationalize/co-opt corporations whenever they want. In that way they get the benefits of private innovation and enterprise along with the ability to essentially eminent domain entire businesses and sectors at will. It's worked scarily well for them, and they are on the verge of eclipsing our model in the next few decades. The severe cost of it, of course, is measured in lives and liberties, something that West would not (and should not) accept.

But the thing is, we have no answer to that at all. We don't really even discuss it anymore as a nation. There is no national debate about public works or long-term planning from anyone except a tiny portion of the left, while the rest of the political class argue about gender and race and toilets and guns and abortions. It's almost like all the culture wars are an intentional distraction from our failing system of government and economics, where the rich keep getting richer every year -- especially during covid -- and everyone else falls further and further down the ladder. We're so fucked without some sort of forward thinking. Wish we could see some actual leadership for once...

[Retric]

> Maybe it's just the natural end of our golden age.

Alternatively, America simply lacks obvious large scale investments to make.

High speed rail seems like a winner, but is it? We have a very efficient national train network for goods and both an interstate highway system and airlines. As a practical matter HSR is unlikely to change much and is really expensive to build and maintain.

Similarly rural high speed internet is pushed as a must have, but 5G and Starlink are much cheaper solutions to the same problems. Getting wired high speed internet to central Alaska for example is extremely expensive and probably not worth it. Where to draw this line in pure economic terms probably isn’t exactly where telecom companies picked, but there wasn’t a clearly better option.

Bridges and Dams have similarly been added to all the obvious locations. Should we build X is again a really difficult choice.

[Aperocky]

> China the county younger than the US. Linking the history as a monolithic entity is really propaganda

If you know anything about Chinese mentality and how it deeply affect all level of its society, you'll know that it didn't start from 1949. While the government initially tried to suppress China's historic roots in 1960s and 1970s to install a communist utopia, it failed miserably, and they have stopped trying since and embraced it.

As it stands, the first statement quoted is hilarious.

[Retric]

People defiantly get taught to make such connections and people therefore do feel a connection. But all that proves is propaganda works.

It’s no more accurate to trace China’s history through prior empires covering it’s approximate borders as it is to it through the British empire which ruled some of it’s current territory, subjugated them, and still has a huge influence on current culture. The obvious reason to do so is to suggest a shared cultural identity.

Even just trying to pick which empires to include as Chinese is completely arbitrary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri_66ztYa5o.

[Archelaos]

Germany, with its 200,000 year history,[1] has for its transport infrastructure at least 15 year plans, which are only moderately legally binding. They are readjusted approximately every five years. New 15 year plans are being developed before the new ones expire, and there are is also some overlap between the plans. With this in mind, the current government has a transport infrastructure plan for 2040 on its agenda.

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

[smallmind]

In this bridge example, not only did it cost $19 billion to build, but the tolls collected actually do not cover operating costs. Doubt their 20 year plan included having to dump more money into the bridge to just keep it working. There are a lot of Youtube videos about China's similar problems with their large high speed rail network.

[Closi]

To OPs point though, the goal wasn’t to pull a profit it was to build links between the two countries.

[whimsicalism]

Hong Kong isn't a separate country

[Closi]

Ok, special administrative region. It has its own laws, currency etc so I don’t think this changes the overall point.

[Aperocky]

you can say the same about most of China's vast highway network. When they were newly built, most of these didn't have the traffic needed.

Now a few of them are constantly congested.

[HWR_14]

I don't understand your point. The US may not be old, but European and other histories are taught. Meanwhile, how much impact do the war of the three kingdoms have on modern China?

[caycep]

I also somewhat worry the attention to safety standards make Aperture Science seem like a paragon of OSHA compliance....

[Yaina]

Remember: Alert your supervisor!

https://www.deviantart.com/orbital-vector/art/Portal-2-Remem...

[phendrenad2]

Somewhere between US stagnation and China/UAE building for the sake of building lies a happy medium.

[chii]

i bet that happy medium is not a stable equilibrium because any force on one side (or the other) pushes the balance. There's no restoring force.

[maxcan]

Yes, and its called Singapore and Japan.

[roenxi]

It isn't so much that I disagree as I think the frame is a bit skewed. When America is operating at its peak everyone has similar complaints (switching "end justifies the means" with "you can do whatever you like if you have money" because historically the US operates using money as a medium).

Whenever anything happens people complain that some interests aren't represented or that resources aren't being used in the way they'd like. The point of the article is more that the US has systemically made it illegal to deploy resources quickly and effectively.

[throwusawayus]

at all levels ? there must be limits to this approach right ???

otherwise this way of thinking gets terrifying fast and rapidly descends into conspiracy theory land

example: "need to find a socially-acceptable solution to a demographic time bomb caused by decades of one child policy, while still maintaining ethnic homogeneity ? perform gain-of-function research to develop a vector that disproportionately harms the elderly"

to be absolutely clear, I don't believe this was actually the case in 2019 at all - but as an no-limits "end justifies the means" thought exercise - it is easy to arrive at inhuman dystopian nightmares

[stathibus]

It should surprise nobody that an authoritarian, centrally planned, and massively resource-rich country can perform infrastructure miracles. You don't have to stoop to conspiracy theories to understand this.

[chii]

> can perform infrastructure miracles.

Some of the infrastructure has lead to extra economic benefit beyond just the infrastructure stimulus. But other infrastructure might not - and i would call them economic waste (but not political waste).

Have a look at the train projects described here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITvXlax4ZXk

The building of those rail networks is meant to achieve a political purpose, rather than an actual productivity increase. Perhaps their leadership thought it was worth the spend, but this sort of spending would unlikely work in the US imho.

[lazide]

We literally did that with the US highway system, it was just right after WW2.

Same goals, same trade offs, same sometimes major wins, sometimes pointless spending.

[ggm]

Rail > Road for freight, and efficiency. America underfunded rail and the Eisenhower highway initiative demanded it, to justify the investment.

Chinese new year, more people travel in China than the whole of the USA, homecoming notwithstanding. It's mass transposition, there and back again.

They need trains. I've used them shanghai to Beijing, great service. I wish I'd been able to use the maglev in shanghai

[FredPret]

With freight, if you consider all factors, road is much more efficient for all but bulk loads or edge cases.

You can make more economical runs per month with trucks than with trains, meaning you get to have less stock on hand as a buffer on both ends.

This has many knock-on efficiencies - fewer resources tied up in goods, lower insurance expense, lower warehousing cost, and above all: a more flexible and responsive supply chain.

[unmole]

China expanded high speed rail that can't be used for freight. It makes perfect sense to connect megalopolises with such a network. But when you start building out to Podunk provincial towns when the passengers can't afford the high prices, they'll continue to take the bus. Meanwhile your shining example for modernity and progress turns into a debt bomb.

[seanmcdirmid]

The maglev in Shanghai isn’t very usable: it doesn’t go to the city center, just somewhere remote in pudong. It is fast, but if you need to get to the airport from somewhere except one or two places in Shanghai a taxi would do better. But definitely ride it once.

[dotancohen]

  > The building of those rail networks is meant to achieve a political
  > purpose, rather than an actual productivity increase. Perhaps their leadership thought
  > it was worth the spend, but this sort of spending would unlikely work in the US imho.

You might want to read a bit about the Space Launch System, a well-known political jobs program that many consider a hindrance in advancing the art of space flight.

https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/index.html

[secondaryacct]

Yes at all levels, do you want me to tell you what we do to kill a virus ? :D

For natality dont just think today, think 50 years ago when the goal was to reduce it: forced abortion, abandonning your newborn at the nearest wet market (high volume of people) was very common. It's harder to force people to copulate, but I trust our overlords to find a way ahah

The virus however, I m more of the opinion that to fix SARS we decided to import thousands of vietnamese bats to study or such thing and fucked up one way or another. I dont think it was made to kill old people, it was a crazy large scale risky project to prevent the next SARS - the end justifies the means, but this time the means were very costly to foreigners. We dont care yet, or at least we managed to pretend our costs were still low enough not to execute every single person involved, as one should have done if millions of Chinese had died.

[Robotbeat]

China’s ZeroCovid policy worked pretty well, but it’s failing with Omicron. And unfortunately, the nonMRNA domestic vaccines aren’t terribly effective. So it’s possible millions of Chinese people will still die. (I hope not.)

[secondaryacct]

You're right, I think we dont prepare for the worst case. Im in HK and just today our dear leader said nobody could have predicted 2 millions HKers would be contaminated (5000 deaths).

Well, let s give her that but then the central gov, surely NOW they can predict 25% of China being contaminated ? How are they preparing ?

[Retric]

> demographic time bomb

China actually solved the excess men problem problem via ethnic cleansing.

Send men to reeducation camps while you import surplus men from another location to eliminate a minority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide

It’s even more disturbing when you read up on the details, and consider the elderly aren’t yet a problem.

[ashwagary]

>China actually solved the excess men problem problem via ethnic cleansing.

How would the US behave if it had Wahhabist extremists near one of its borders? We've only seen how the US responded to some 6000 miles away in Afghanistan, most of them were brutally executed, not deradicalized or reeducated.

[kortilla]

“Here’s an unrelated thing an unrelated country did, therefore it’s okay.”

[makomk]

The US did not, in fact, brutally execute most of the population of Afghanistan. Remember, it's the Ugyur population as a whole that China has "deradicalized or reeducated" - not just active terrorists, not even religious extremists, but everyone.

[savingsPossible]

Are the Ugyurs comparable to Wahhabists?

Also, does the US uniformly target Wahhabists ?

[ashwagary]

The Uyghurs being targeted for deradicalization are Wahhabist (an offshoot of Salafism) that have a lot in common with, and in many cases directly trained by, Al Qaeda.

Granted, the net may be slightly larger than it needs to be due to China's high population density and the resulting fact that terroristic acts have a high human cost... but it's nowhere near the scale of our (US) net across Afghanistan, Syria, and Pakistan.

The vast majority of muslim communities in China have nothing to do with this kind of extremist ideology, don't commit acts of mass terror, and are not part of these deradicalization programs.

[seanmcdirmid]

The net worth a cast really broadly, and a Uighur doesn't have to be a Wahhabist to be labeled as needing re-education through labor, just expressing dissent is good enough. China has already done this with the rest of its population, even many Han were subject to these camps. The party has a lot of practice here and is only doing what it knows.

[throwusawayus]

i agree that is disturbing but it is not what i was referring to, sorry I meant excess old people - age demographics - not excess men.

based on projections china's population peaked ~last year. it is a shrinking population from here, and while this will be a huge problem in most of the world (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735230 discussed recently) but it is happening MUCH sooner in china, and at an unprecedented scale.

it is an existential threat and i am sure their government sees this, and it is scary to think what an "ends justify the means" way of thinking leads to with this problem

[Retric]

Yes, my point was that’s a looming problem but not currently an issue so we can only guess how their going to solve it. But, the options considered are anything up to including say romanticizing elderly suicide.

[jokethrowaway]

If we're lucky they'll pioneer growing babies entirely in vitro, no humans needed besides their DNA (which is branch of research I'd really like to see but morals in the West prevent that)

[mensetmanusman]

That is a good joke.

[droptablemain]

China is dealing with terrorism in a far more graceful way than the U.S. ever has. They're doing it with education and jobs.

[tsol]

Forcibly re-education and forced jobs(read: labor) is more accurate. Graceful isn't the right word. They're certainly more efficient, but their efforts are not without vast international condemnation. As much as I deplore the US response to terrorism, China's response isn't exactly a breath of fresh air

[bllguo]

what do you propose? because this all just sounds so naive. obviously the methods are horrible but there is no feel-good response to terrorism. can you really blame a nation for taking a zero-tolerance approach?

"international condemnation" is hardly a meaningful metric. It comes from 1. countries that have done and are doing far worse (slaughter, invasion, fomenting regime change), 2. countries that are sitting there wringing their hands as internal strife mounts over the increasing culture clash, and 3. countries that are lucky enough not to have these problems.

[ericmay]

> what do you propose?

I propose they just leave them alone.

[Retric]

Forced abortions are a little more than just education and jobs.

[FredPret]

Jobs in a concentration camp though

[misslibby]

Suppose you are an elite that wants to control the global economy, and you hit upon the idea that a "Great Reset" would be necessary.

How do you build a reset button? A "mild" pandemic seems like an interesting approach.

Also not saying this was the case at all. However, it is a fact that gain of function research was being conducted, sponsored by the USA.

Oh, and if the modern biotech solution fails, WW3 might do the trick the traditional way.

[technobabbler]

Man, this shadowy cabal was so good, they started a global pandemic that brought the world economy under its control, made everyone fall in line behind pandemic mandates, shut up all dissent and turned everyone into zombies who now work three times as hard.

That's exactly what happened, right?

[misslibby]

It kind of happened? Many countries established new levels of censorship and control. People installed tracking apps and got used to constant surveillance. All sorts of things. But not good enough, hence the need for WW3.

Anyway, not saying it was or is a master plan. Just saying that if you were hypothetically thinking about a reset button, a pandemic would be a clever approach, and within technological reach.

"The Great Reset" was the official motive of the World Economic Forum. They absolutely do want a reset.