I think one confounder is whether waging a war requires a lot of human beings.
If it does, then you need some kind of modern society to keep them relatively happy, or they'll fight for the other side. If you can deploy killer drone robots, then you don't need to worry about what the population thinks as much.
In the 60's western economists were afraid that the authoritarian central planning of the Soviet Union was intrinsically more efficient than the slowly adapting free market to the extent where economists started to study ways of incorporating the sovietic dynamic in the west. [https://www.gsid.nagoya-u.ac.jp/sotsubo/Krugman.pdf]
Now China doesn't represent any kind of alternative model that risks replacing the one adopted by western countries, unlike the Soviet Union. Realistically nobody is afraid of being taken over by China. So I think that any kind of impact that China might have in this regard would be quite limited.
There is quite a lot of fear of China being ahead or getting ahead, and it is being exploited by tech companies to secure funding from the department of defense:
https://t.co/7by2iroWWD
Competition from a completely alien culture can generate mobilization, i.e. different societal strata working together for a common purpose. This is what the US is doing with China today, or did with Japan in the '80s.
What the USSR generated was different: it was the fear that the lower classes could band together, overthrow the established order, and actually succeed in running the country. It wasn't an attack from an alien culture, that the establishment feared; it was successful subversion from within. There is no fear of that when it comes to China.
Yes, every external force that has influenced the US is unique in some dimension.
To me the biggest difference between China and Japan is that China is much more likely to challenge the US among all dimensions of power, whereas my understanding of Japan in the 80s is that they simply started to be slightly competitive in an economic dimension.
So I do think that there is a higher likelihood that China’s rise opens up more debates about certain deep assumptions we have in the US than Japan’s did. And some of these may be about the primacy of private property. Private property is not a law of physics but it is a very deeply set assumption we have. The idea that housing is an investment more than it is a human necessity is something that may be worth questioning more and more. If investor owned housing in the US keeps trending up (already around 20%) then at some point it will likely be helpful to have another successful system to point at and learn from for solutions.
I have many issues with the CCP but as long as large scale war is avoided, this will be the silver lining in its rise. Hopefully there are clearer successes of some socialist aspects our society can learn from.
It isn't though. a capitalist country would have private ownership and control of companies. China has government companies and government control of private companies and works lock step all together to keep the average joe in line and the factories churning out product. They now even have a strong man in charge for life. Therefore, China is more accurately described as a communist country that saw communism didn't work so they spent half a century pivoting to fascism while keeping the commie colors and aesthetic motifs.
China is run by the Chinese communist party. You can’t own a house there (only a 99 year lease) and their notion of private property is very different. It’s not that simple.
None of that screams workers rights, nor welfare of the common people. Quite the contrary. If Marx was living in the XXI-st century, he’d be writing about Chinese instead of English factories. In fact the lack of workers rights makes it more reminiscent of theoretical capitalism than anything in the West.
All I am saying is that it's a vast oversimplification of an economic and political system composed of over 1 billion people to simply say "it's capitalist". The overarching point here is that as China rises hopefully we in the US can learn something from their system and integrate it into ours. The idea that we can't do so because "they are a capitalist country and so are we" is reductionist and I was trying to point out ways in which that was the case.
You want to integrate "the individual is nothing" and the birthplace caste system?
You are aware of the reality behind the shiny propaganda videos of skyscrapers?
The anti-meritocracy, were beeing born into party aristocracy gives you undeserved jobs, whose lack-of-skills underpaid underlings have to compensate for if you screw up? The reactionary politic changes, that always trigger if things are to late? The absence of any plan beyond keeping the status quo?
Look at the zero covid, were literally a revolution has to happen, for a unfeasable plan and the corresponding corruption to be undone? Literally all initiatives and plans result in this, a surface level placation, corruption cancer growth beneath and suffering by the citizens who made the economic miracle of china really happening - against the ccp resistance.
This is what you want to integrate into western societies? Why?
I understand the utopian, shangri-la projections of the failed western left, but please not on some labor camp..
They certainly have their fair share of negative aspects that I wouldn’t want to integrate.
To be more concrete one specific thing I would like to see more of in the US is some sort of change to the political process that would allow more engineers to get into positions of power. Right now it’s all lawyers, and I think this is a big reason why the US is not good at large infrastructure projects anymore (California high speed rail, building more nuclear plants etc.)
If it does, then you need some kind of modern society to keep them relatively happy, or they'll fight for the other side. If you can deploy killer drone robots, then you don't need to worry about what the population thinks as much.