4 ms·

I'd say they're delusional. Everyone made this assumption in the '90s, that prosperity necessarily lead to freedom. 20 years later that assumption doesn't look

by cthor 7y ago

I'd say they're delusional. Everyone made this assumption in the '90s, that prosperity necessarily lead to freedom. 20 years later that assumption doesn't look so good.

derefr 7y ago
Maybe people in the 90s assumed "prosperity" in general would be a panacea; but the hypothesis here isn't really to do with GDP more generally (because that can all be generated and captured by the state, as in middle-eastern oil-producing countries) but rather to do with a certain inevitable demographic shift. China has already started on a shift called industrialization: a massive demographic shift from poverty-class subsistence farmers, to middle-class industrial workers (e.g. construction workers.) The next shift after industrialization is a mass promotion out of the working-class and into the middle-class (a.k.a. the bourgeoisie: small-business owners/entrepreneurs), where industrial jobs dry up, people mostly live in cities, and everyone goes into business for themselves to serve a specialized role in a city. Accompanying this is, also inevitably, a massive rise in political consciousness, because you need to study the political climate to effectively run a business. Now, that second shift is far from happening in China yet. Their industrialization phase only just started 10 years ago, with a construction boom analogous to the one that the US went through in the late 1800s. It'll likely be decades more before there are no more Chinese public-infrastructure projects; before the average Chinese citizen is rich enough that everyone turns their nose up at working in the trades; before the average Chinese citizen's life-goal is to be a vlogger or whatever kids in developed countries want to do now. But, despite that phase being a ways away, it's also seemingly inevitable. We've never seen a country get stuck in the industrialization phase once it's truly begun. It's finite by definition—the same forces that create this phase of growth, push a country through and past it. The only deciding factor on how long it takes a state to become democratized, in this theory, is how long it takes to reach the industrialization phase. It took China a long, long time (probably because Communism put them at a standstill in accruing the necessary resources and talent to begin having a working class at all; they had to relent and do some top-down state capitalism just to get anywhere at all.) And many states are stuck lower down the development path, where they'll likely never reach industrialization without outside help. That "help" usually coming in the form of the world deciding to target them as the newest cheap labor outsourcer. (Luckily, once China is post-industrial, it too will be a labor outsourcer, not a labor supplier.)
- president 7y ago
  You need to think of China like North Korea. There is very little chance they are going to democratize in the near future.
  - derefr 7y ago
    All else being equal, sure. But China are still making construction workers into nuveau-riche at a prodigious rate. They're creating the proto-Rockefellers and proto-Carnegies of China, right now. Those people, and especially their children (who would become the actual Rockefellers and Carnegies of China), are going to have some impact. China might "manage" (i.e. suppress) that impact, but a large bourgeoisie class is uniquely powerful in terms of its ability to throw money around to influence foreign politics as a knife against the throat of the local state. Consider: the Napoleonic Wars weren't a consequence of the French Revolution; they were the second phase of the French Revolution. Sometimes the best thing to do to get your government in better shape, is to convince every other major power that your state is the bad guy and needs its ass kicked. Right now, China is (barely) keeping a lid on global unrest against them—but a big part of that is that right now, Chinese citizens are still mostly positive and patriotic about their homeland, as you'd expect of people who just went through an industrialization boom. Take that coefficient and flip the sign the other way, though...
    - president 7y ago
      You are 1) assuming the majority Chinese people want democracy and 2) underestimating the strength of the CCP to crack down on freedom seeking peoples. I get that you are being optimistic and I would like to believe the same but the current state of reality proves otherwise. If we were observing the earth in a computer simulation, I would love to give infinite time to see if democracy arises in China. However, in the real world, China does not live in a vacuum and it is actively undermining democracies by exporting its crackpot communist worldview to free countries all around the world. We cannot just sit there and wait for them to erode our freedoms. It's as simple as that.
      - 7y ago

by cthor 7y ago

I'd say they're delusional. Everyone made this assumption in the '90s, that prosperity necessarily lead to freedom. 20 years later that assumption doesn't look so good.

derefr 7y ago

Maybe people in the 90s assumed "prosperity" in general would be a panacea; but the hypothesis here isn't really to do with GDP more generally (because that can all be generated and captured by the state, as in middle-eastern oil-producing countries) but rather to do with a certain inevitable demographic shift. China has already started on a shift called industrialization: a massive demographic shift from poverty-class subsistence farmers, to middle-class industrial workers (e.g. construction workers.) The next shift after industrialization is a mass promotion out of the working-class and into the middle-class (a.k.a. the bourgeoisie: small-business owners/entrepreneurs), where industrial jobs dry up, people mostly live in cities, and everyone goes into business for themselves to serve a specialized role in a city. Accompanying this is, also inevitably, a massive rise in political consciousness, because you need to study the political climate to effectively run a business. Now, that second shift is far from happening in China yet. Their industrialization phase only just started 10 years ago, with a construction boom analogous to the one that the US went through in the late 1800s. It'll likely be decades more before there are no more Chinese public-infrastructure projects; before the average Chinese citizen is rich enough that everyone turns their nose up at working in the trades; before the average Chinese citizen's life-goal is to be a vlogger or whatever kids in developed countries want to do now. But, despite that phase being a ways away, it's also seemingly inevitable. We've never seen a country get stuck in the industrialization phase once it's truly begun. It's finite by definition—the same forces that create this phase of growth, push a country through and past it. The only deciding factor on how long it takes a state to become democratized, in this theory, is how long it takes to reach the industrialization phase. It took China a long, long time (probably because Communism put them at a standstill in accruing the necessary resources and talent to begin having a working class at all; they had to relent and do some top-down state capitalism just to get anywhere at all.) And many states are stuck lower down the development path, where they'll likely never reach industrialization without outside help. That "help" usually coming in the form of the world deciding to target them as the newest cheap labor outsourcer. (Luckily, once China is post-industrial, it too will be a labor outsourcer, not a labor supplier.)

president 7y ago
You need to think of China like North Korea. There is very little chance they are going to democratize in the near future.
- derefr 7y ago
  All else being equal, sure. But China are still making construction workers into nuveau-riche at a prodigious rate. They're creating the proto-Rockefellers and proto-Carnegies of China, right now. Those people, and especially their children (who would become the actual Rockefellers and Carnegies of China), are going to have some impact. China might "manage" (i.e. suppress) that impact, but a large bourgeoisie class is uniquely powerful in terms of its ability to throw money around to influence foreign politics as a knife against the throat of the local state. Consider: the Napoleonic Wars weren't a consequence of the French Revolution; they were the second phase of the French Revolution. Sometimes the best thing to do to get your government in better shape, is to convince every other major power that your state is the bad guy and needs its ass kicked. Right now, China is (barely) keeping a lid on global unrest against them—but a big part of that is that right now, Chinese citizens are still mostly positive and patriotic about their homeland, as you'd expect of people who just went through an industrialization boom. Take that coefficient and flip the sign the other way, though...
  - president 7y ago
    You are 1) assuming the majority Chinese people want democracy and 2) underestimating the strength of the CCP to crack down on freedom seeking peoples. I get that you are being optimistic and I would like to believe the same but the current state of reality proves otherwise. If we were observing the earth in a computer simulation, I would love to give infinite time to see if democracy arises in China. However, in the real world, China does not live in a vacuum and it is actively undermining democracies by exporting its crackpot communist worldview to free countries all around the world. We cannot just sit there and wait for them to erode our freedoms. It's as simple as that.
    - 7y ago