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This is totally simplistic. If you think western journalists are incentivised to criticize basic societal norms and systemic problems, I have a bridge to sell y

This is totally simplistic. If you think western journalists are incentivised to criticize basic societal norms and systemic problems, I have a bridge to sell you. I'm also not sure where you're getting these 'hyper-critical' editorials from - where I come from, nearly 150 thousand people just died in a pandemic, and the media has barely said a critical word. Obviously, in China, they are allowed to criticize even less, but westerners do not read chinese news. What's more, nor does anybody else. So the image of China doing very well is not for a lack of bad press. If you read publications about China over the last decade or so, it's a constant slew of doomsaying, and negativity, mostly about problems that turned out to be very surmountable or insubstantial. The image of China becoming more and more hegemonic is simple: look at their economic growth. Look at the size of the nation. Look at their intellectual culture. China being a very powerful country is a return to a historical norm, and is a totally reasonable development given how big their population is, how skilled it is, and its values. Meanwhile, the west is seen as falling apart because it is having a massive identity crisis which involved things like the leader of the free world bragging about how big his nukes were on Twitter. I'm not frankly particularly enthusiastic about China as a world power - I'm not a fan of confucianism, for example, and CCP spokespeople talk like politicians from dystopian sci-fi, but I think it's profoundly wrong to think China is deceiving the world with its masterful press controls. Far from it - the direct censorship and press controls are very blunt mechanisms most states have given up on because they don't work and if you're good at media, you don't need them anyway.

cromwellian 5y ago
China was never really a world power, even at its height. Look back at Western history: Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, the British Empire, or the Mongols, or further back, the Xiongnu. Han China mostly stayed confined to its own self imposed borders, with the exception of the acquisition of Xinjiang and the Tibetan plateau, and some voyages by Zheng He. I guess what I'm saying is, if China becomes a hegemonic power, it won't be militarily, it'll be economically, sort of like monopolies/oligopolies today, and those kinds of powers can be resisted much more easily by soft power methods. The economic growth argument fails to impress it. Every nation that goes through an agrarian->industrial conversion experiences huge economic growth until they transition to a developed service sector economy. Much is made about Chinese infrastructure building, but did you ever look at what was done by FDR under the New Deal? 1 million kilometers of roads built. 10,000 bridges. 40,000 schools. etc. The Tennessee Valley Authority built tens of thousands of miles of electric grid. Or take progress in the Space Program of China. It looks impressive, but Von Braun founded the US rocket program in 1945, and NASA was founded in 1958. 11 years later, there were men standing on the moon. Things only look fast now, because developed Western economies have settled into long term 2-3% service oriented economy growth. With China's declining birth rate, rising cost of living and wages, it too will experience a slowdown.

cromwellian 5y ago

China was never really a world power, even at its height. Look back at Western history: Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, the British Empire, or the Mongols, or further back, the Xiongnu. Han China mostly stayed confined to its own self imposed borders, with the exception of the acquisition of Xinjiang and the Tibetan plateau, and some voyages by Zheng He. I guess what I'm saying is, if China becomes a hegemonic power, it won't be militarily, it'll be economically, sort of like monopolies/oligopolies today, and those kinds of powers can be resisted much more easily by soft power methods. The economic growth argument fails to impress it. Every nation that goes through an agrarian->industrial conversion experiences huge economic growth until they transition to a developed service sector economy. Much is made about Chinese infrastructure building, but did you ever look at what was done by FDR under the New Deal? 1 million kilometers of roads built. 10,000 bridges. 40,000 schools. etc. The Tennessee Valley Authority built tens of thousands of miles of electric grid. Or take progress in the Space Program of China. It looks impressive, but Von Braun founded the US rocket program in 1945, and NASA was founded in 1958. 11 years later, there were men standing on the moon. Things only look fast now, because developed Western economies have settled into long term 2-3% service oriented economy growth. With China's declining birth rate, rising cost of living and wages, it too will experience a slowdown.