[mikestorrent]

You don't need to brand efficiency and structure-at-scale as "authoritarian"; how painfully American of you. I know it's a completely foreign concept for anyone that has grown up in America, but it's actually within the realm of human possibility for the government and the individual to be aligned and want the same thing. Typically this is evidenced by tremendous social progress, which we see in evidence with the rapidly rising standard of living in China over the last few decades.

It's easier when your government is proposing "hey, let's build all the factories the best way we can" and not "hey, let's impose illogical and continually-changing tariffs on everything and let Howard Lutnick's kids steal all the proceeds". You're right as an American to be skeptical of the government - it's not operating in your best interests unless you're one of the elite insiders. That doesn't mean it has to be that way.

[ianbutler]

You're providing much too much credit to China's government, the dynamic is simpler:

China just hasn't calcified yet after workers press for better standards of safety and quality of life and maybe they won't because that's where being authoritarian comes into play. They will crush that in a way we have moved away from.

We used to build great things in the US and then we decided the blood price of 30 lives for the Brooklyn bridge or 100 for the hoover dam wasn't worth it. It's really not hard to build anything when you ignore any second order questions of impact. Why do you think certain people here want deregulation and for the EPA to go away.

A quick google shows China prioritizes speed over safety something we've decided here in the US is not acceptable.

[palmotea]

> We used to build great things in the US and then we decided the blood price of 30 lives for the Brooklyn bridge or 100 for the hoover dam wasn't worth it. It's really not hard to build anything when you ignore any second order questions of impact. Why do you think certain people here want deregulation and for the EPA to go away.

Because wouldn't it be just totally awesome for our rivers to burn again?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught...

> In 1868, 1883, 1887, 1912, 1922, 1936, 1941, 1948 and 1952 the river caught fire, writes Laura La Bella in Not Enough to Drink: Pollution, Drought, and Tainted Water Supplies. Those are some of the incidents we’re aware of; it’s hard to say how many other times oil slicks may have ignited, as press coverage and fire department records were both inconsistent. But not all the fires were as innocuous as that of 1969. Some caused millions of dollars’ worth of damage and killed people. But even with the obvious toll on the landscape, regulation of industry was limited at best. It seemed more important to keep the economy booming, the city growing and people working. This attitude was reflected in cities around the country. The Cuyahoga was far from the only river to catch fire during the period. Baltimore, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Buffalo and Galveston all used different methods to disperse oil on their waters in order to prevent fires.

[ianbutler]

I’m not those people you’ll not find a disagreement from me

[vincnetas]

for 2023 us vs china workplace fatalities per 100.000 are 3.5 vs 3.0 in favor of china. (quick ai query)

in regards to calcification of china your position is unclear. you say that china advances due to pressure from workers but at the same time claim that pressure from workers is irrelevant because government can crush them at will. you cant have the cake and eat it too...

[b112]

quick ai query

AI halucination is well known, and output is non-repeatable.

There is also no indication of what timeframe, what industry, how it is calculated and more.

AI responses are starting points, and should never be considered factual without verification.

If you want to have any trust in youe numbers, find real stats, from a reliable source.

[red-iron-pine]

> China just hasn't calcified yet

aye. the old elite of China were overthrown by the communists, whose (that is, Mao's) decisions starved most of the country, followed by the insanity of the cultural revolution.

the new technocratic leadership is just that -- new. really only started happening in the 1980s and 90s.

the US is falling apart due to the entrenched hyperwealthy seeing more and more rents. China's hyperwealthy are all new money and are not entrenched yet, not the way groups like Ford or Boeing or Goldman Sachs are. But soon they will be, and soon the CCP will start prioritizing their needs

[superxpro12]

For all the progress, you lose me immediately with the "social credit" system. If there was really true 'progress', then you wouldn't need a one-party system that suppresses all dissent.

Only need to look to the recent changes in Hong-Kong and the obviously hostile takeover of a democratic government to see how "pure" these changes really are.

[hamandcheese]

> If there was really true 'progress', then you wouldn't need a one-party system that suppresses all dissent.

This makes no sense. It is possible for a totalitarian government which is threatened by dissent and concepts like "democracy" to also work in the interest of improving overall quality of life.

[viraptor]

If things work so well that everyone's quality or life is improved, why would there be dissent large enough to worry about.

It's the same category as: Why would a company with happy well paid workers be worried about unions and try to stop them forming.

[henrikschroder]

> If things work so well that everyone's quality or life is improved, why would there be dissent large enough to worry about.

Have you met people?

[viraptor]

Sure. There's always going to be someone opposing something. But I'm not aware of cases where a disagreement in an environment good for everyone was large enough that it caused the leadership/government collapse. Similarly on a small scale, the number of grumpy people at companies I worked at scaled more or less with how good things were for everyone.

In other words, if things are good enough, there will be more people disagreeing with the totalitarian part than with the overall conditions.

[GreenWatermelon]

Foreign state-actors love to sow discontent in enemy territories. It doesn't matter what they say to rile up the population and cause instability -- they'll just do it.

[thenthenthen]

Social credit system is not really a thing. Yes various apps have various ‘credit scores’ and if you are convicted of crimes you can get travel limitations, but there is no such thing as a ‘social credit system’. Much like how the government is not centralised at all, provinces can make their own laws and so on.

[r14c]

I believe the premise is that you have to oppress the rich to a certain extent to prevent them from usurping the people's government for their own ends.

[xtn]

There are bad things in China, but there is no "social credit" system being used.

[Saline9515]

Yes there is. Why deny it? It's pretty public. In this french documentary, which was later aired on the parliamentary tv channel, the author films his daily life with his chinese wife, who has a social credit account, and interviews officials speaking openly about it. It's 4 years old.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma6txLM_LLs

[ivankabiden]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit_system#Misconcep...

There is no so-called social credit system you western guys have in mind. There is a credit reporting system. It's not that different from the US credit reporting system. But it has far less of an impact on our daily lives than the US system on Americans. For example, no one asks for your credit report when you want to rent a house.

[yanhangyhy]

i dont have.. and nobody talks about it.. in china.

this remind me one of the ep of the TV show <newsroom> when they found so many evidence of a massacre using chemical weapons and broadcast it.. and then found out its all fake.

[Saline9515]

If no one talks about it, why is this .gov.cn article discusses the problems currently posed by the existing social credit system? There isn't indeed a nation-wide score, but given the size of Chinese municipalities (often larger than most countries in the world), it's far from anecdotal.

https://credit.fgw.sh.gov.cn/xyyj/20220902/8693d5ba378d4f578...

[ivankabiden]

There is a credit reporting system, similar to the one in the US. However, most people are not affected by it in their daily lives. Only those who are in serious financial trouble and cannot pay off their debts are placed on a blacklist, which restricts them from traveling by high-speed rail or flights.

[yanhangyhy]

> There isn't indeed a nation-wide score

there is no score at all. even this article didn't talk about anything about 'score'. its no different compare to many other countries. soical credit system is a general concept.

I do wish everybody outside of china have your mindset. then we have nothing to worry about.

[stx5]

fake news!

[TheOtherHobbes]

There's a social credit system everywhere. It's called "money". It's quite literally and explicitly a credit system that rewards certain behaviours and castes and punishes and disempowers others.

The fact that everyone in the West is used to it doesn't alter the fact that it's social engineering at scale and not a law of nature.

[resters]

Snowden's revelations showed that the same stuff exists in the US.

[shimman]

Dude come on, the US already has a social credit system. Where do you think China got the idea of credit scores from? Try getting a good loan in the US if your credit score is under 400. You're barred from having certain jobs if you don't have a good credit score.

Get some new talking points, you're like 40 years out of date.

[Saline9515]

The difference with China is that the US credit score is limited to your banking activities.

[m4ck_]

It's not just loans and banking. Bad credit severely limits your housing options, even rooms for rent are running credit checks these days. Some employers too, even in roles where you aren't directly handling money or anything close to it.

[Saline9515]

I understand this, but I meant that the data sources used to build credit scores are mainly banking/debt related. Jaywalking ore saying slurs online won't affect it, unlike in China.

[kakacik]

*not yet. And if you are not US citizen and coming in as a tourist, what you write applies heavily and can end up in properly harsh treatment. So its not as rosy as you write (which already ain't rosy)

[palmotea]

The difference between a social credit score and a credit score is when you criticize the president, your social credit score goes down, but your credit score stays the same.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The people who have been stalked and apprehended by ICE for online criticism of what ICE is doing might not agree.

As might visitors who are being asked to show five years of social media history to make sure their views are politically acceptable.

Free speech is over. If dissent isn't being actively punished - the current push for deanonymisation is coincidental, no doubt - at the very least it's heavily throttled algorithmically.

[MSFT_Edging]

That's not actually true. Companies can opt to report your employment to credit agencies, providing another datapoint in background checks.

[deadfoxygrandpa]

what do you think china's credit system is like?

[digitalPhonix]

Have you tried renting recently?

[biggoodwolf]

No true scotsman

[typ]

If that were the true secret sauce of the economic success in China, why had it not taken off before the 2000s? Like, they have been that "aligned" and "want the same thing" and "run by engineers" since the 50s, no?

[wat10000]

It kind of did. GDP per capita grew at around 6% per year from 1952-1980. It was starting from such a low base that it was still pretty low in 1980, but it was much improved. And Mao was not an engineer.

[typ]

6% compared to the post-2000s is mediocre, especially given the low baseline. Not remarkably better than other high-income democratic countries like Japan and West Germany. Even the US can have ~4% growth at the time.

[tw1984]

> why had it not taken off before the 2000s?

This topic has been discussed on Chinese forums and social media for like 1 million times. The short answer is it did. To give you a prefect example - the J-10 fighter jet was first tested in 1998, it shot down multiple best EU made fighter jets last year.

[maxglute]

They did. Developmental state for huge country = phases measured in generations. 1.4B can't get away with building a few industries like other tigers, JP/SKR/TW/SG who can capture a few highend and do fine per capita.

TLDR timeline

50s-70s was soviet engineers / knowledge transfer from post war wreckage. Built basic industry, 80s-10s was relentlessly building out every industrial chain for every sector except leading edge because lack talent. Talent pipeline was 90s-00s building out academic system, 2010s-20s was brrrting tertiary talent. Couldn't brrrt tertiary talent without teaching peasants literacy in 60s, and then having literate parents in 80s family planning (i.e. one child policy) which filtered generations of 1-2 kid households where surplus went towards education/tertiary. All the recent highend progress recently was result from that, step by step building on generational phase/timescale. PRC only passed US in total STEM a few years ago, now they on trend to talent inflection point 2x-3x STEM vs US in next 20 years. People mock one child policy, but it was exactly choreographed for this outcome, one of few cases of generational peasant to phd planning, though 50 year foresight to build up greatest high skill demographic dividend in human history, not 100 year foresight because cost is shit TFR in the next 50 years.

[dash2]

> it's actually within the realm of human possibility for the government and the individual to be aligned and want the same thing.

Actually, this is very hard because different individuals want different things. Normally you need a mechanism like the market or democracy to aggregate individual preferences. Expecting a dictatorship to do this well seems optimistic, and the full history of communist China doesn’t support the idea.