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It helps to be a dictatorship that can force anybody to do what they want, and send to camp people that don't. It also helps to have millions of cheap workers,

It helps to be a dictatorship that can force anybody to do what they want, and send to camp people that don't. It also helps to have millions of cheap workers, and a gigantic, rich, soil. And it's easier if you not care about destroying everything in your way. Still. It's impressive for exactly the same reasons. It's hard to foster an intellectual elite in a dictatorship, to maintain motivation and cooperation across a gigantic country and 1.7B of people. Beside, we did the same: polluting, forcing population to work, etc, only 100 years before, but we attacked other countries while doing so. Which China haven't. And about this pollution thing, they seem to correct trajectory faster than we did, given their timeframe and inertia. It's amazing to watch.

Cthulhu_ 7y ago
> It helps to be a dictatorship that can force anybody to do what they want, and send to camp people that don't. It also helps to have millions of cheap workers, and a gigantic, rich, soil. And it's easier if you not care about destroying everything in your way. Is this about China or the US? I mean it's got prison / slave labor, cheap workers (minimum wage, what's that?), huge lands, etc. Don't think the US moved away from those practices a hundred years ago, they're still doing it, they're just calling it differently and it's coming from financial interests now instead of political ones (e.g. private prisons that make sure to keep their cells (over) full and their cheap labor supply up)
- _iyig 7y ago
  EDIT: Seems I got baited. Removing my comment to bring things back on topic.
  - tntn 7y ago
    > lock up millions of people for purely ideological reasons No, just for being black.
  - otaviokz 7y ago
    It has the largest inmate population in the world, in total number, not %. Can you imagine if China locked up the same % of it's population?
  - ionised 7y ago
    You might be surprised to learn about some of the shit the US does to its own citizens.
  - wavefunction 7y ago
    Some contend that family separations are still occurring: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-migrant-family-separations-continue-border-20190508-story.html https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-migrant-fam...
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't take HN threads even further into ideological and nationalistic flamewar. These discussions are all the same, which makes them predictable, which makes them boring apart from the intense indignation they provoke. That is not what HN is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
_iyig 7y ago
>It's hard to foster an intellectual elite in a dictatorship Have we forgotten about Nazi technical excellence, Werner von Braun, and the Soviet space program? It’s easy to pour money into STEM fields. If you only crack down on ethnic minorities and outspoken dissenters, and if you censor uncomfortable news about these crackdowns, the majority of your engineers and scientists won’t care enough to DO anything. This approach worked for the Nazis and, to a lesser degree, the Soviets. It is working very well in China.
- oblio 7y ago
  > Have we forgotten about Nazi technical excellence, Werner von Braun, and the Soviet space program? One could argue that both the Nazi and the Soviet programs had roots in pre-existing system setup up before the totally authoritarian ones took over. For Germany, Imperial Germany + the Weimar Republic (both flawed democracies, but still, democracies) and for the USSR, Imperial Russia, which ok, might have not have been democratic in any modern sense, but was pretty liberal from a scientific and artistic point of view. Way more so than the USSR. If anything, both the Nazis and Soviets drained their scientific communities so much that by the end of the regimes they almost destroyed them.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    I don't see the drainage; 70 years after the October revolution, the USSR was still being first on important space exploration milestones, including the first permanently manned space station, in 1986. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_program#Notable_firsts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_program#Notable_f...
    - oblio 7y ago
      That came later. The USSR drained everything else to keep the space program and the military at a high level until it fell. Once it fell, I'm pretty sure most of those researchers ran wherever they could, as fast as they could.
      - 7y ago
makotech222 7y ago
Lol we definitely have all of that. Camps -> Prisons Cheap Workers -> Immigrants Gigantic Rich soil -> all of America. The political system here is incredibly rotten, though. That's the main difference.
Bakary 7y ago
>It's impressive for exactly the same reasons. It's hard to foster an intellectual elite in a dictatorship, to maintain motivation and cooperation across a gigantic country and 1.7B of people. On the contrary you could argue that the brutal competition in the country encourages people to be razor sharp in some fields. A more controversial and touchy point is that they have a strong sense of national and ethnic unity, which many democracies lack. This has many disadvantages of course,[0] but can be extremely helpful for maintaining cooperation and motivation at a large scale whereas the West arguably has trouble dealing with ennui and lack of purpose. To some extent the form of functional ethno-nationalism China has is hard to reproduce elsewhere, and is the result of very specific historical and geographical factors. Japan and Turkey for instance have similar traits but nowhere near the same results. So China is tautologically highly suited to doing what it is currently doing. [0] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/11/19/the-upper-han https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/11/19/the-upper-han
- sametmax 7y ago
  I wonder what built this, becauqe clearly it's not new. China use to do it 2000 years ago too.
  - Bakary 7y ago
    You could spend your entire career on this topic and still never find the answer, but this article gives a nice summary of some of the factors. https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/evolution-chinese-nationalism https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/evolution-chinese-nat...
- someguydave 7y ago
  In one sense, China is only ~70 years old, and it was born in a horrific era that lead to yet more horrors. When a few generations live and die without hunger or war, it will be interesting to see if they are so willing to believe whatever the Chinese government wants them to believe.
matthewdgreen 7y ago
I'm not convinced you have to be a brutal dictatorship in order to support significant government investment in key industries. You just need a lot of money and a political willingness to spend it.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Not even a lot, just a big enough percentage to sway things.

Cthulhu_ 7y ago

> It helps to be a dictatorship that can force anybody to do what they want, and send to camp people that don't. It also helps to have millions of cheap workers, and a gigantic, rich, soil. And it's easier if you not care about destroying everything in your way. Is this about China or the US? I mean it's got prison / slave labor, cheap workers (minimum wage, what's that?), huge lands, etc. Don't think the US moved away from those practices a hundred years ago, they're still doing it, they're just calling it differently and it's coming from financial interests now instead of political ones (e.g. private prisons that make sure to keep their cells (over) full and their cheap labor supply up)

_iyig 7y ago
EDIT: Seems I got baited. Removing my comment to bring things back on topic.
- tntn 7y ago
  > lock up millions of people for purely ideological reasons No, just for being black.
- otaviokz 7y ago
  It has the largest inmate population in the world, in total number, not %. Can you imagine if China locked up the same % of it's population?
- ionised 7y ago
  You might be surprised to learn about some of the shit the US does to its own citizens.
- wavefunction 7y ago
  Some contend that family separations are still occurring: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-migrant-family-separations-continue-border-20190508-story.html https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-migrant-fam...
dang 7y ago
Please don't take HN threads even further into ideological and nationalistic flamewar. These discussions are all the same, which makes them predictable, which makes them boring apart from the intense indignation they provoke. That is not what HN is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

_iyig 7y ago

>It's hard to foster an intellectual elite in a dictatorship Have we forgotten about Nazi technical excellence, Werner von Braun, and the Soviet space program? It’s easy to pour money into STEM fields. If you only crack down on ethnic minorities and outspoken dissenters, and if you censor uncomfortable news about these crackdowns, the majority of your engineers and scientists won’t care enough to DO anything. This approach worked for the Nazis and, to a lesser degree, the Soviets. It is working very well in China.

oblio 7y ago
> Have we forgotten about Nazi technical excellence, Werner von Braun, and the Soviet space program? One could argue that both the Nazi and the Soviet programs had roots in pre-existing system setup up before the totally authoritarian ones took over. For Germany, Imperial Germany + the Weimar Republic (both flawed democracies, but still, democracies) and for the USSR, Imperial Russia, which ok, might have not have been democratic in any modern sense, but was pretty liberal from a scientific and artistic point of view. Way more so than the USSR. If anything, both the Nazis and Soviets drained their scientific communities so much that by the end of the regimes they almost destroyed them.
- icebraining 7y ago
  I don't see the drainage; 70 years after the October revolution, the USSR was still being first on important space exploration milestones, including the first permanently manned space station, in 1986. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_program#Notable_firsts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_program#Notable_f...
  - oblio 7y ago
    That came later. The USSR drained everything else to keep the space program and the military at a high level until it fell. Once it fell, I'm pretty sure most of those researchers ran wherever they could, as fast as they could.
    - 7y ago

makotech222 7y ago

Lol we definitely have all of that. Camps -> Prisons Cheap Workers -> Immigrants Gigantic Rich soil -> all of America. The political system here is incredibly rotten, though. That's the main difference.

Bakary 7y ago

>It's impressive for exactly the same reasons. It's hard to foster an intellectual elite in a dictatorship, to maintain motivation and cooperation across a gigantic country and 1.7B of people. On the contrary you could argue that the brutal competition in the country encourages people to be razor sharp in some fields. A more controversial and touchy point is that they have a strong sense of national and ethnic unity, which many democracies lack. This has many disadvantages of course,[0] but can be extremely helpful for maintaining cooperation and motivation at a large scale whereas the West arguably has trouble dealing with ennui and lack of purpose. To some extent the form of functional ethno-nationalism China has is hard to reproduce elsewhere, and is the result of very specific historical and geographical factors. Japan and Turkey for instance have similar traits but nowhere near the same results. So China is tautologically highly suited to doing what it is currently doing. [0] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/11/19/the-upper-han https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/11/19/the-upper-han

sametmax 7y ago
I wonder what built this, becauqe clearly it's not new. China use to do it 2000 years ago too.
- Bakary 7y ago
  You could spend your entire career on this topic and still never find the answer, but this article gives a nice summary of some of the factors. https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/evolution-chinese-nationalism https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/evolution-chinese-nat...
someguydave 7y ago
In one sense, China is only ~70 years old, and it was born in a horrific era that lead to yet more horrors. When a few generations live and die without hunger or war, it will be interesting to see if they are so willing to believe whatever the Chinese government wants them to believe.

matthewdgreen 7y ago

I'm not convinced you have to be a brutal dictatorship in order to support significant government investment in key industries. You just need a lot of money and a political willingness to spend it.

AstralStorm 7y ago
Not even a lot, just a big enough percentage to sway things.