> Playing false equivalence games will end very badly.
Okay: Chinese report higher satisfaction with their government and the direction their country is headed in than virtually any Western nation and much more than in the US. The Chinese economy is doing the opposite of enshittification, whereas the US is openly embracing the trend at this point with inflation / capital strikes, shrinkflation, consolidation, rent-seeking, and overall lower quality of goods and services. The home ownership rate in China is about 90%. Real wages in China are steadily rising and have been for decades - in the US they are falling and have done for decades.
America's primary means of diplomatic leverage is military domination but it can't even prevent the Houthis from a virtual blockade of the Red Sea and sea traffic through there has dropped 90%. Meanwhile China is transforming entire continents with its superior industrial capacity and soft power. They are the world leader in clean energy research and production. They got kicked out of the International Space Station so they built a better one and left an open invitation to the nations that kicked them out of the ISS, to join them on the Tiangong Space Station after they come to their senses.
China has already won. Chinese socialism, won. If there is a positive future for humanity at this point, it is in China and China alone. The West is still coming to grips with this. Posts like yours are transparently cope.
China is still a developing nation. China is winning at the junior economic Olympics. The same way all the major 1st world economies dominated it when they were developing.
Come back and waive your victory banner when China has a $60k GDP per capita and has the current growth trends it does. It needs to increase its GDP 500% before that happens though...
GDP per-capita only works if you're comparing places with similar costs to live and costs to produce.
It's nearly meaningless to use it as a measure of individual quality-of-life without correlating it to the price it costs to produce/consume goods.
This is why the military spending arguments are so weird comparing the US and China. Even omitting the weird bookkeeping that keeps their defense budget supposedly low, it costs much less to produce military goods/services than here.
China is the workshop of the world what are you even talking about? Their infrastructure is more developed (and more advanced) than most places in the US.
You seemed to be confused by the fact that China hasn't financialized their economy and turned it into a giant Ponzi scheme / wealth extraction machine. That's the point: they're trying to avoid the terminal rent-seeking behavior endemic to Western economies.
>>China hasn't financialized their economy and turned it into a giant Ponzi scheme / wealth extraction machine.
OK, nevermind that China are struggling with massive real-estate and shadow banking issues that threaten collapse of their economy and serious global economic crisis. They may succeed, but it has been touch-and-go for years now.
And yes, their 'workshop of the world' initiative works when they can massively export at super-low prices, but that is ending for several reasons, in no small part due to the fact that they are an unreliable trading partner and have weaponized their trading position against partners in a variety of ways, including spying (e.g., Huawei), cutting off supplies (rare earths, etc.), and dumping goods under cost to corner markets.
You can get away with that for a while, and your numbers will look very good. But when you start to become a serious threat, you will find resistance. We are now at that point. China was supposed to have already surpassed the US as the worlds largest economy almost a decade ago. Now, it is no longer on that arc, despite having five times the population. Their BS is catching up with them.
Always a pleasure when people wail in anguish about Huawei when you consider even just the public record stuff the CIA and NSA etc have gotten away with over the years. And that's not even getting into the more tinfoil-hat shit a lot of which has mountains of circumstantial evidence to back it up.
No, I think the US is a much less reliable trading partner, even for aligned Western nations to say nothing of the rest of the world, and the pivot to China that virtually every nation on Earth is making, if it's not a functional tributary of the US (and even many of them, actually), speaks for itself.
I was not talking about false equivalence about their economic status; I was talking about falsely equating or 'whatabout-ing' their human rights status.
And if you think that polls of life satisfaction are meaningful among a population who are forbidden to criticize their govt except in limited ways (e.g., local officials), I'd like to talk about some fantastic oceanfront land in Kansas...
Economy? Of course people are happier to have a change from abject poverty, but it is entirely based on unfair export trade practices and highly leveraged investments both official and shadow-banking. At this point both are extremely fragile as the democracies start to catch on and the over-leverage starts to work against it. Even the massively over-inflated official growth numbers have tanked. On the economy, I'd choose to be in the USA over China, no hesitation.
"Transforming entire continents"? You mean making extortionate loans to impoverished countries to build their own ports and extract resources? Again, that has limited runway as people figure out that it isn't such a good deal.
And I notice that you entirely avoided the human rights citizen security issue. Yes, the US has corporate over-harvesting of data, and govt agencies can buy and/or demand access to the data. We also have court processes. Meanwhile, China has OFFICIALLY one party, a massive and highly intrusive surveillance and censorship apparatus second to none in the world, and mobile execution vans literally seizing and executing people on the street by the tens of thousand or more, but there are no public records. Again, no contest, USA is massively qualitatively and quantitatively better.
Serious question, if you don't think so, why haven't you moved to China? I'm sure they'd welcome such an advocate.
Ah, I se you are one of those who chooses to chooses to ignore the facts of the world [0,1,2,3,4,5]. This is just the top results of a 0.1second search
And I notice that you completely avoided my serious question: If it is so much better in China, why are you not moving there?
> If it is so much better in China, why are you not moving there?
I don't speak Chinese and I'm an American citizen. "If X is so great why don't you move to X?" is such a typical retort from reactionaries to any criticism of the status quo that it's literally a meme. I'm not surprised to find this on HN but I am surprised that you lack self-awareness to the extent that you're actually doubling down on it, here.
I'm not doubling down or using it as a retort. I wanted an actual answer to the question, particularly since you so adamantly claim that China is far for human rights than the USA.
Your answer is that it is friction of change from where you are, which is fine, although a bit at odds with your stridency about how bad the USA is and how innocent China is.
If you are right that China/CCP has already won, you should really consider getting motivated to overcome that friction and go there. Especially considering how most of the West is withdrawing from China, your skills and attitude will likely be quite welcome there.
(Or, perhaps consider that your motivation levels are not aligned with the attitude you present because maybe your attitudes aren't quite aligned with reality?)
I don't think you know what the fuck you're talking about. One power eclipsing another does not imply a mass migration, as you suggest. It can just be... one power eclipsing another. It doesn't mean everyone can or even should move there, and it certainly doesn't mean that reactionary dickheads pushing back against any criticism of the status quo have some ace in the hole gotcha argument they can apply to any and all situations, as you seem to think. Your line of reasoning here, again, is transparently copium.
Quite the contrary, I will stay in the US because I anticipate that our loss of power and prestige vis a vis China will result in many structural changes as we are forced (often against cultural inertia) to embrace more advanced productive relations to have any hope of keeping up. I want to be here for that, thanks.
Since when does questioning whether one person might move equal a mass migration or and ace-in-the-hole argument? Your language seems to indicate a sore spot has been hit.
We will see how it turns out. The main question is whether China has stolen enough technological ideas and knowledge to achieve escape velocity on their own. They've enjoyed free reign for 'partnering', coercion, & industrial & academic espionage for decades, and have indeed made very significant advances. That access is now being curtailed. If China has gained enough, and has sufficient financial assets, and can manage it, it should be able to bootstrap itself to next levels. Or, it may start faltering, in no small part to the inherent structural limitations of authoritarian states.
I think it is very much an open question
I'd still put my chips on the Democracies. Betting against the USA has always been a bad bet. But it's still been less than 250 years, so things may change.
> Your language seems to indicate a sore spot has been hit.
Uh yeah? Because you're not arguing in good faith. As I've already said, "if you like it so much why don't you move there" is such a boring dogshit argument that even South Park made fun of it. Twenty years ago. It would be one thing if you knew anything about me or my circumstances, but since you don't, I can safely assume that you frequently apply this logic as a rebuttal to any criticism of the status quo, which is an extremely small-brained, liberal thing to do. Nice work.
At any rate, all states are authoritarian, so if there is some structural limitation inherent there, the US and China are on equal footing. The real structural limitation at issue here lies in the US where we have both a highly-centralized economy dominated by a few actors and one driven entirely by the profit motive. Not a good spot to be in unless you think rent-seeking is good for productivity. Which, hell, given your performance in this thread so far, maybe you do think that. But, it isn't. This explains the respective growth and development trajectories of both nations.
Anyway I'm done with this thread as you still haven't put anything compelling or thought provoking into any of your dozen or so posts here, and I'm not interested in reading any more of your reactionary liberal bullshit arguments, if that's what we're calling them. So feel free to put whatever witty zingers you like in your inevitable reply, with links to Adrian Zenz' Twitter account etc. I hope we don't cross paths here again.
If you believe that, you believe in rendering language meaningless
Authoritarianism is on a spectrum, and there is a MASSIVE difference between very authoritarian states like Russia and China vs the USA.
If the USA operated like Russia or China, Julian Assange would have disappeared or been executed decades ago, and not be set free today.
Under more democratic societies, the institutions of government and society are all independent. In govt, the executive, legislative, judicial branches, and in society the institutions of press, academy, industry, religion, commerce, sport, community, etc. all operate largely independently of each other. Under absolute or relative authoritarianism, they are coerced to varying degrees to serve the benefit and/or whim of the executive.
Again, there is a massive difference, and I'm afraid it is you who are failing to bring thought to the conversation. Good day.
Okay: Chinese report higher satisfaction with their government and the direction their country is headed in than virtually any Western nation and much more than in the US. The Chinese economy is doing the opposite of enshittification, whereas the US is openly embracing the trend at this point with inflation / capital strikes, shrinkflation, consolidation, rent-seeking, and overall lower quality of goods and services. The home ownership rate in China is about 90%. Real wages in China are steadily rising and have been for decades - in the US they are falling and have done for decades.
America's primary means of diplomatic leverage is military domination but it can't even prevent the Houthis from a virtual blockade of the Red Sea and sea traffic through there has dropped 90%. Meanwhile China is transforming entire continents with its superior industrial capacity and soft power. They are the world leader in clean energy research and production. They got kicked out of the International Space Station so they built a better one and left an open invitation to the nations that kicked them out of the ISS, to join them on the Tiangong Space Station after they come to their senses.
China has already won. Chinese socialism, won. If there is a positive future for humanity at this point, it is in China and China alone. The West is still coming to grips with this. Posts like yours are transparently cope.