Thanks for being open-minded and having a dialog. I wouldn't call China loosely-enslaved; Chinese certainly don't see themselves as working for the Party, but

Thanks for being open-minded and having a dialog. I wouldn't call China loosely-enslaved; Chinese certainly don't see themselves as working for the Party, but for themselves, or for a prosperous China as a whole. Even though the information environment here is completely controlled, life really does feel free for the most part. Is it really a Pyrrhic victory when a Chinese middle class family can have a comfortable, genuinely happy life? How is that family's happiness different from that of a family of westerners that comes here and lives happily for many years, as many of my friends have done? But more to your point, it's true that America has some special sauce that 1) drives innovation faster than anywhere else in the world, and 2) attracts people to settle there from all over the world. But we see that Freedom is neither sufficient to become an innovation powerhouse (look at much of Europe) nor is it necessary (see Korea and Taiwan in the 70s and early 80s, which back then were very much not Free). If you want to point to something as the reason why China is less innovative than the US on the whole, I'd point to the emphasis of rote memorization in the school system, and to the fact that college is kind of a joke, at least for the techies I've talked to. But that will slowly change, and even now China has a vibrant startup ecosystem. The Party knows that for its long-term survival it must align its own interests with those of the people. And right now, to quote Singaporean academic Kishore Mahbubani in a recent Sinica podcast, "the primary goal of the Chinese Communist Party is to revive Chinese civilization." Of course, the party will insist that this be done on its own terms. Human rights issues need not be addressed here because in practice they do not factor in. The US especially emphasizes these things because it loves to have the moral high ground (and I believe it does), but that unfortunately does very little to slow the rate at which the US, with its ineffective strategy over the last two decades, is ceding the geopolitical high ground.