[0_____0]

That's the most obvious example of failure of Chinese central planning. That and one child policy were abysmal failures that resulted from shoddy science coupled to effective central authority.

Look at the 12/13/14th 5 year plan (the most recently passed). Do you think they achieved their goals?

If your headcanon is that the CCP is inept because they caused crop failures 60 years ago... you could stand to take a look at what they're doing today.

[ahartmetz]

I guess the summary is as simple as: Good five year plans are great, bad five year plans are terrible.

There are sooo many variables in how one could go about making and executing five year plans. They must have figured out a couple of things that tend to work.

[xbmcuser]

The big difference recently from the past is instead of philosophers its scientists who are making the plans and decisions in China so are willing to course correct instead staying the course despite bad out comes.

[impure-aqua]

I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was heavily influenced towards implementing the one child policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a rocketry background and presented a model whereby the population would grow to an unsustainable level unless corrective control was applied.

I think it is unlikely philosophers would have suggested to treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.

[daymanstep]

UN birth rate projections have also been consistently wrong for the past decades.

I think even most experts did not expect fertility rates to follow the trend that it has been following for the past few decades.

[maxglute]

>treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.

Treating human resources like resources because 100s of millions of bodies ultimately subject to statistics. "Libtard" philosophers from small countries don't truly have to reckon with Malthusian pressure and law of large numbers.

And PRC family planning wasn't wrong, averted ~300m births, and bluntly PRC still left with ~400/1400m surplus mouths trapped in low-end farming and informal economy. Otherwise they'd have 1000m/1700m, more than 400+300 because every family with more kids is one that can't concentrate surplus/resources on tertiary/skill uplift. Now PRC left with TFR problem, but averted developmental doomsday scenario of too many subsistence peasants, aka where India trending towards.

[steveBK123]

A good read in this area is Dan Wang's book - Breakneck

One could probably summarize it as having engineering leaders solve engineering problems is good, but they can very efficiently implement very bad social policies. Likewise having non-STEM leaders in charge of things like agricultural planning is also bad.

That said modern China is less socialist/communist than a weird state capitalism machine with a dictatorship.

One big difference to modern China vs USSR for example is instead of having 1-2 car companies churning out the cars the state demands, you have more of a competitive local government subsidized market. So they have 50+ car companies all competing in the local marketplace for sales, and eventually some good car companies have surfaced. This was never going to happen with Lada.

[zozbot234]

> a weird state capitalism machine with a dictatorship.

That's not a completely new model, either - Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore all went through remarkably similar phases. Countries have tended to become freer and more democratic as they grow wealthy enough to build a sustainable middle-class and a genuine civil society that enjoys some basic independence from government.

[steveBK123]

Yes, and thats where the west ended up going wrong in our line of thinking. The assumption was if we facilitated their transition into middle class economy / rich world standards via trade deals and offshoring.. they'd follow the same path as our now allies - JP/TW/SK/SG/etc.

That is - the assumption was democracy/civil liberties would follow wealth. This has not held up. And the promotion of Xi to supreme leader probably for life has if anything pulled them further away from that path. Things like the great firewall have helped him in that effort.

[zozbot234]

China is very far from genuine rich-world standards though, especially if you look at the less developed inner provinces. The relatively tiny middle class they do have clearly lacks the incentive to demand any sudden change at present - they'd have way too much to lose. So we're still very much in the "authoritarian phase" of this whole dynamic.

[xbmcuser]

That is actually bullshit fed to you all democracies that have been brought down in the last 60-70 years democracies have been brought down by the west. And most dictatorships propped up by them unless they threatened Israel or were perceived a threat to Israel. It was not civil liberties or any such reason that any moves were made it was about capitalism vs socialism or Israel. West capitalists have no interest in civil liberties or democracies hence they bring down any socialist democratic party or leader which has bring about fascists in power in the west.

[mschuster91]

> I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was heavily influenced towards implementing the one child policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a rocketry background and presented a model whereby the population would grow to an unsustainable level unless corrective control was applied.

The problem wasn't the idea of modeling itself, it was to not be aware of what we know today from Africa - with more wealth and especially less child mortality, reproduction will drop in about one generation, even without punitive governmental intervention. Even 60 years ago, people tended to have anywhere from 3 to 5 children, just because the chance was so high that at least two would simply die before reaching adulthood.

But thanks due to better maternal healthcare, vaccinations and OSHA, that mortality rate dropped significantly, and so people adapted on their own - and that's before getting into women being able to control fertility on their own or housing/cost of living exploding in the same timeframe.

[constantcrying]

>I think it is unlikely philosophers would have suggested to treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.

We are talking about Marxist philosophers. These weren't some scholars of Christianity, who would have insisted on the inherent worth of human life and the injustice of state intervention deep into personal lives, these were the same "philosophers" who justified extermination programs based on the insufficient revolutionary spirit of the exterminated.

[refulgentis]

If your headcanon is "5 year plans are great because some chinese supplier has cheap DDR-4", I would submit a gentle introduction to history is helpful (i.e. we took a couple irrational great leaps forward from cheap DDR-4 => China owns the RAM market => 5 year plans are the way to go)

[christophilus]

I think it’s at least valid to conclude that a nation-level commitment to taking over a specific industry can work. You can gut your competitors and then dominate. It’s the Uber strategy applied at the geopolitical level.

If you could figure out how to get your country to dominate the world economy without also allowing your leaders to commit campaigns of mass-internment and extermination, then maybe you’d have a decent political system.

[0_____0]

It's not the Uber strategy, because there's a physical limit to how efficiently a human can drive another human around the city. The Uber strategy was to push out competitors then bring pricing back up.

Chinese PV isn't going to get more expensive. The massive subsidies seen by Chinese PV companies from 2005-2024 account for a whopping 3.2% of solar firm incomes. [1] Over that same 2004-2024 period, solar cells prices have fallen to about 4-5% of 2024 prices. Not a typo. It's not the Uber model if they win by actually making the product at a fraction of the cost.

[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/subsidies-and-the-solar...

[refulgentis]

> I think it’s at least valid to conclude that a nation-level commitment to taking over a specific industry can work

From ONE supplier having cheap DDR-4 currently?

[adrian_b]

What is impressive is that this has happened despite the great efforts of USA to sabotage the Chinese semiconductor industry in order to eliminate the competition for Micron.

The second wave of "sanctions" (after those against Huawei done to eliminate the competition of Qualcomm) have been enacted when Chinese companies were ready to take a dominant position on the SSD market. Even Apple had decided to use the Chinese SSDs in their products.

Without the so-called "sanctions", the market of memory devices, both for SSDs and for DRAM would have looked extremely different today and we would have not been hit by this shamelessly huge increases in the price of memory modules, SSDs and HDDs.

The so-called US "sanctions" have never been true "sanctions", because they have never been tied to any kind of political demands. They were just measures taken to destroy the competitors of certain US companies, which were implemented through various kinds of blackmailing methods that are available, for now, to the US government.

[refulgentis]

This comment makes several claims that don't survive scrutiny.

"Sanctions to eliminate the competition for Micron" — The October 2022 export controls and YMTC's Entity List designation were part of a sweeping national security policy targeting advanced compute capabilities, not a protectionist carve-out [1]. Multiple allied governments (UK, Australia, Japan, Netherlands) independently reached similar conclusions and imposed their own restrictions. If this was "for Micron," it backfired spectacularly: China retaliated by banning Micron from critical infrastructure projects in May 2023, costing Micron ~25% of its revenue [2].

"Huawei sanctions done to eliminate the competition of Qualcomm" — Huawei's CFO was indicted for bank fraud related to Iran sanctions violations [3]. The Five Eyes intelligence consensus on Huawei infrastructure risk predates the Trump administration by years (flagged since at least 2012) [4]. Reducing this to "helping Qualcomm" requires ignoring criminal indictments and an entire allied intelligence assessment.

"Chinese companies were ready to take a dominant position on the SSD market" — YMTC's global NAND share didn't reach ~10% until Q3 2025, three years after sanctions [5]. In 2022 they were a small player with single-digit share. Samsung alone held ~35% [6]. "Ready to take a dominant position" is not supported by any market data from that period.

"Even Apple had decided to use the Chinese SSDs" — Apple was in an exploratory testing phase and dropped YMTC in October 2022 before the Entity List designation in December, amid political scrutiny and its own risk assessment [7]. No Apple product ever shipped with YMTC memory. "Had decided" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

"This shamelessly huge increase in the price of memory" — This is the most egregious misattribution. The 2024+ memory price crisis is driven by: (1) Samsung/SK Hynix/Micron massively reallocating wafer capacity to HBM for AI accelerators, which requires far more wafer area per bit than conventional DRAM [8]; (2) deliberate production cuts in 2023 after the oversupply glut (Samsung posted its worst quarterly profit since 2009) [9]; (3) structural AI demand consuming enormous DRAM/NAND capacity [10]. Chinese memory companies at single-digit market share were nowhere near large enough to have prevented Samsung and SK Hynix from chasing the vastly more profitable HBM market. That's the price driver, not sanctions on YMTC.

The monocausal "US sanctions to protect Micron caused expensive memory" narrative requires overstating China's pre-sanctions market position, mischaracterizing Apple's exploratory talks as a commitment, ignoring the documented reasons for the sanctions, and attributing a price crisis driven by AI demand to restrictions on companies that held single-digit share.

[1] https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/11/the-evolution-of-...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65667746

[3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-telecommunications-co...

[4] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-huawei-threat-us-nat...

[5] https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-it/2026/01/30/5RWQ5BS2H5H4HAYM6...

[6] https://gizmodo.com/chip-china-semiconductor-1849354820

[7] https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-decides-using-cheap-chinese...

[8] https://spectrum.ieee.org/dram-shortage

[9] https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/06/samsung-cuts-memory-chip-p...

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024–present_global_memory_sup...

[adrian_b]

> Huawei's CFO was indicted for bank fraud related to Iran sanctions violations

This is the official US justification. This does not mean that is also true.

The Huawei sanctions happened immediately after Huawei had shown their next generation CPU for smartphones, which was better than the next generation CPU shown by Qualcomm, and also immediately after market surveys announced that Huawei will become in a few months the world leader in the smartphone market, in front of Samsung.

When something like the US sanctions happens, what matters is who is the beneficiary, not which is the official explanation. The beneficiaries have been mainly Qualcomm, Apple and Samsung. The US sanctions were exactly what they needed, the only thing that could stop their competition.

The accusation of dealing with Iran and the blackmailing of Huawei by arresting the daughter of the CEO in Canada, are probably based on true facts, but they have probably been known for many years and they have only been exposed at that time in order to legally justify the sanctions, but due to the timing and consequences of the sanctions it is completely implausible than the old deals with Iran were their real motivation. After all, USA has also made deals with Iran, when they had the interest to do this, and they have not sanctioned themselves in such a way that would affect world economy in unrelated markets. When USA forces citizens of other countries to lose money by buying more expensive smartphones, because there is lower competition, how exactly does this hurt Iran?

The sanctions against the makers of memory devices did not have any credible "national security" motivation, despite the official claims.

> "Ready to take a dominant position" is not supported by any market data

I am too lazy to search now for quotations, but some time before the announcement of the US sanctions there were published prognoses for the future market share of YTMC, which was projected to grow very fast, after they had announced a new generation of more dense SSDs, which they were willing to sell at lower prices, to get market share. The fact that Apple has stopped their plans to use YTMC as supplier, a short time before the announcement of the sanctions, does not prove anything, except that the Apple management was probably already aware of this outcome.

> "This shamelessly huge increase in the price of memory" — This is the most egregious misattribution.

I agree with what you said about the present causes of the memory price increases. However, that has nothing to do with what I have said, which did not contain any misattribution.

What I have said is that if an increased competition on the memory market would not have been prevented by the US government, today we would have had more vendors and more diverse vendors on this market. In such a market, a deal like that of Altman and the other deals for exclusive contracts with the memory vendors would have had a much less impact. So great price increases would not have happened, because the other vendors would have been eager to step in and increase their market share. The memory market would have been much more stable. Now, in markets with 2, 3 or at most 4 vendors that matter, just a few exclusive contracts are enough to destabilize the market.

[zozbot234]

You can only "gut" the competition if you're genuinely able to supply at lowest cost in a sustainable way. Selling at a loss and trying to make it up in volume is not a very good strategy. The Uber strategy was betting on having robotaxis everywhere, and then raising prices when they found out that this wouldn't be a viable solution in the near term.

[adrian_b]

The current memory prices are many times higher than the costs. Last month I was forced to buy some memory and it was more than 3 times more expensive than last summer. Moreover, this was in Europe, where currently computers and related products are cheaper than in USA, unlike in the previous years. The same memories that I have bought in Europe were much more expensive on Newegg.

If you can make memories, selling them at half the price demanded by Micron and the like is not selling at a dumping price, but it is selling with what in normal times would have been considered as a huge profit margin.

[mapt]

Studies of the 20th century manufacturing learning rate suggests that creation of arbitrary goods drops on the order of 15-20% every time you double production volume. This is before general purpose robotics and AI! Just interchangeable tooling, Taylorism, Ford style assembly lines, Toyota's supply chain ideas.

Selling at a modest loss and making the volume happen eventually means you're not selling at a loss anymore.

[trueismywork]

One child policy has brought a demographic problem today but has solved an existential problem in 70s

[mystraline]

Notice the go-to for capitalists against communism is "Look at how many people they killed!!!"

No such metric is available for capitalist countries. Thats because its *always* an individual failure in capitalism, not political/societal.

You CHOSE not to have healthcare. (You work 1099, or work a job that doesnt provide healthcare, due to tying job and health.)

You CHOSE to go with UnitedHealthCare that denies 30% for baseless reasons. (The company chose your plan, you have no real choice here.)

You CHOSE to be homeless. (You can't force companies to interview or hire you.)

You CHOSE to eat the only food nearby (You live in a food desert).

Just from Hepatitis C, the company that makes Solvaldi makes a cure. Costs $84k, $1000 a pill for 84 days.

But we see more and more deaths from Hep C. But this is a "personal failure", not a systemic one in a capitalist country.

[steveBK123]

"Under capitalism, man oppresses man. Under socialism, it's just the opposite"