[CrackerNews]

Authoritarian vs democracy is too overly simplistic a framework, IMO. More rather it is Chinese Marxist-Leninist democratic centralism vs Western liberal representative republics.

The Communist Party of China obtains and centralizes authority from the lower layers to the upper layers, but the Chinese leaves the implementation details of its five-year plans at the local level. The political incentive is to make your bosses and subordinates look good, so they don't lose the mandate to reign to another clique in the party. Of course there was the example of the USSR failing to succeed in the global stage, but the Chinese variant is working in interpreting Marxism and Leninism to the Chinese 21st century.

Meanwhile, the Western model was based on prior enlightenment and humanist ideals before Marxist critique of 19th century capitalism. The idea was that an enlightened populace would be able to democratically elect representatives to best represent themselves and their interests as opposed to a king, but the West after capitalism is largely setup to reward international capitalist incentives over other national interests.

However, the two worlds are interdependent on each other. It was the first world outsourcing its manufacturing to this second world that led to its current prosperity. The first world instead pursued services and financialization.

[thombee]

One of the only reasonable comments in this thread full of ignorance