> 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 di

> 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... :-)