>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 giga

>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