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Remember when the Soviets were on top of the world in the 1950's, largest military in the world, Sputnik, ICBM and nukes, building a Communist Bloc to match NAT

Remember when the Soviets were on top of the world in the 1950's, largest military in the world, Sputnik, ICBM and nukes, building a Communist Bloc to match NATO and the United States. Fast forward 40 years and it was all gone. Look at China now, gleaming ghost cities that will require massive infrastructure maintaince cost to maintain all funded with massive amounts of debt, a huge population bubble that will drag down China's productive capacity in the comming decades, a world that is more strongly and vocally resisting Chinese influence everyday. What looks powerful and inevitable now only does so because people tend to miss the whole picture.

ceilingcorner 6y ago
Weird that this is downvoted. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
- ipsocannibal 6y ago
  Yeah, it's pretty common that anything that remotely questions China's rise inevitably gets downvoted on HN. Funny how a supposed powerful and up and coming nation has to constantly silence its critics (just look at HK or early Covid journalist). Its almost as if the myth of China's supposed success is just that, a myth.
- iforgotpassword 6y ago
  Because Russia was just focusing on the arms race, nothing else. China does in fact get people out of poverty and is making serious efforts to make education as accessible as possible. For the past 20-something years "experts" have made predictions of how China will catastrophically fail "in the next 5 years" because whatever the latest issue was that we just identified with how China does things wrong. At least you put your predictions 20 years in the future so you don't have to correct them that often. ;-) And while it's true that China has a lot of internal conflicts and issues, I don't see how any of them should pose a serious threat to their road to success, or rather not more than the issues we have in the west now. As the article says several times, it's better to prepare, rather than trying to find arguments that the problem will magically solve itself and everything will comfortably stay the way it is.
  - ceilingcorner 6y ago
    > China does in fact get people out of poverty and is making serious efforts to make education as accessible as possible. That is exactly what the Soviet Union did for the first 30 years of its existence. > For the past 20-something years "experts" have made predictions of how China will catastrophically fail "in the next 5 years" because whatever the latest issue was that we just identified with how China does things wrong. At least you put your predictions 20 years in the future so you don't have to correct them that often. ;-) 20 years ago, China was barely on the radar of anyone in the media. > As the article says several times, it's better to prepare, rather than trying to find arguments that the problem will magically solve itself and everything will comfortably stay the way it is. I don't disagree with that, but it's always important to accurately identify the problem before implementing solutions.
    - iforgotpassword 6y ago
      > That is exactly what the Soviet Union did for the first 30 years of its existence. While I unfortunately can't time travel back and visit Russia to make a direct comparison, from everything I read and heard about the efforts in Russia, it was primarily tuned to enable brilliant people to do research with unlimited resources, preferably in directions that would yield military benefits. Improving general broad education was more or less a side-effect of this. The initial communist Marxist movement was deteriorated by corruption and the conflict with the US much quicker than that in China. Again, I wasn't able to witness the overall sentiment in Russia back in those times, but it seems to be that China is doing much better in this regard and their people truly and strongly believe in their country. Frankly it is amazing that China is still going strong with its dictatorship and didn't end up at Russia levels yet. > 20 years ago, China was barely on the radar of anyone in the media. Definitely not mainstream media; I have a relative who's a high-up at Volkswagen who I learned a lot from about China starting in the late 90s, and then I had my first business trip to China in 2009. So I've probably been following them closer for longer than the average Joe. I specifically thought of people like Gordon Chang when I wrote that comment, who has predicted China's downfall multiple times already over the past two decades in books, TV interviews etc. I mean sure, maybe these predictions eventually become true and the problem solves itself from our POV, but I see it as equally likely that China has built a sophisticated surveillance state until then to reliably shut down any internal unrest in time, so they "just" need to deal with the rest of the world, which brings us back the the article... :-)

ceilingcorner 6y ago

Weird that this is downvoted. Seems pretty reasonable to me.

ipsocannibal 6y ago
Yeah, it's pretty common that anything that remotely questions China's rise inevitably gets downvoted on HN. Funny how a supposed powerful and up and coming nation has to constantly silence its critics (just look at HK or early Covid journalist). Its almost as if the myth of China's supposed success is just that, a myth.
iforgotpassword 6y ago
Because Russia was just focusing on the arms race, nothing else. China does in fact get people out of poverty and is making serious efforts to make education as accessible as possible. For the past 20-something years "experts" have made predictions of how China will catastrophically fail "in the next 5 years" because whatever the latest issue was that we just identified with how China does things wrong. At least you put your predictions 20 years in the future so you don't have to correct them that often. ;-) And while it's true that China has a lot of internal conflicts and issues, I don't see how any of them should pose a serious threat to their road to success, or rather not more than the issues we have in the west now. As the article says several times, it's better to prepare, rather than trying to find arguments that the problem will magically solve itself and everything will comfortably stay the way it is.
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  > China does in fact get people out of poverty and is making serious efforts to make education as accessible as possible. That is exactly what the Soviet Union did for the first 30 years of its existence. > For the past 20-something years "experts" have made predictions of how China will catastrophically fail "in the next 5 years" because whatever the latest issue was that we just identified with how China does things wrong. At least you put your predictions 20 years in the future so you don't have to correct them that often. ;-) 20 years ago, China was barely on the radar of anyone in the media. > As the article says several times, it's better to prepare, rather than trying to find arguments that the problem will magically solve itself and everything will comfortably stay the way it is. I don't disagree with that, but it's always important to accurately identify the problem before implementing solutions.
  - iforgotpassword 6y ago
    > That is exactly what the Soviet Union did for the first 30 years of its existence. While I unfortunately can't time travel back and visit Russia to make a direct comparison, from everything I read and heard about the efforts in Russia, it was primarily tuned to enable brilliant people to do research with unlimited resources, preferably in directions that would yield military benefits. Improving general broad education was more or less a side-effect of this. The initial communist Marxist movement was deteriorated by corruption and the conflict with the US much quicker than that in China. Again, I wasn't able to witness the overall sentiment in Russia back in those times, but it seems to be that China is doing much better in this regard and their people truly and strongly believe in their country. Frankly it is amazing that China is still going strong with its dictatorship and didn't end up at Russia levels yet. > 20 years ago, China was barely on the radar of anyone in the media. Definitely not mainstream media; I have a relative who's a high-up at Volkswagen who I learned a lot from about China starting in the late 90s, and then I had my first business trip to China in 2009. So I've probably been following them closer for longer than the average Joe. I specifically thought of people like Gordon Chang when I wrote that comment, who has predicted China's downfall multiple times already over the past two decades in books, TV interviews etc. I mean sure, maybe these predictions eventually become true and the problem solves itself from our POV, but I see it as equally likely that China has built a sophisticated surveillance state until then to reliably shut down any internal unrest in time, so they "just" need to deal with the rest of the world, which brings us back the the article... :-)