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In the end be it democracy or totalitarianism there's always a small elite controlling discourse. And I'm starting to think china's is managing their country be
by sadmann1 5y ago
In the end be it democracy or totalitarianism there's always a small elite controlling discourse. And I'm starting to think china's is managing their country better than ours
- wayoutthere 5y agoYeah to everyone who says “communism is fundamentally flawed” I just point to China. Sure, they had some growing pains early on but the scale of what they were trying to do was unprecedented. And yes, the Uyghur situation is awful and should be condemned. But let’s not blame that on communism because the US and plenty of its capitalist allies have done as bad or worse (see also the residential schools in Canada or the incarceration rates of black men in the US).
- nipponese 5y agoIt should not be ignored that “growing pains” means ~10 million dead from state-caused famines and imprisoned for thought crimes.
- Fricken 5y agoYes, the transition to modernity was almost as much of a shock for China as it was for the west. Nonetheless, the net effect is raising about 800 million people out of poverty in a little over a generation, an achievement that has no historical precedent.
- logicchains 5y ago>Nonetheless, the net effect is raising about 800 million people out of poverty in a little over a generation, an achievement that has no historical precedent. Taiwan, Singapore and Korea started from around the same starting point as China after World War Two, and all became developed countries much faster (compare their GDP per capita now to China's). You could say "their populations aren't as big as China", but in that case wouldn't the ideal solution have been to split China up into a bunch of smaller countries that could grow just as fast as Korea etc?
- Fricken 5y agoWhat? What sort of mental gymnastics is this?
- logicchains 5y agoAll the "East Asian Tiger" countries achieved much faster economic development in terms of GDP per capita (per head) than China did: search for China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Korea on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi.... There's no theoretical reason a political region should develop slower if the population is larger, if anything economic theory suggests the opposite (a common argument for why America's GDP is higher than Europe's is that it has a larger homogenous internal market). So China's size can't be used as an excuse for its slower development.
- jessaustin 5y agoYou reject population as a factor in modernization (along with, apparently, initial development level, initial education level, initial infrastructure, etc.) and you offer instead... longitude? Why are you comparing China to Singapore?
- woah 5y agoChina developed more slowly than its neighbors, unsurprising given the communist party’s crushing of free communication and enterprise and the killing of tens of millions of people. You’ve gotta be playing really dumb to pretend there’s anything complicated about that.
- wayoutthere 5y agoHuh? China literally slowed its pace of development intentionally so they didn’t kill millions more. They learned that the Great Leap Forward was too fast so they slowed it down and made it a multi-decade project. Interior China was largely subsistence farming 50 years ago and now boasts some of the largest cities in the world. They have industrialized incredibly quickly given the scale of the challenge. You can’t bootstrap enough industry to modernize 1.6 billion people overnight; it takes decades to build. They haven’t gone faster because a country like Singapore can buy enough industrial output from Japan or the US to bootstrap their industry. Nobody has enough spare capacity to build at the scale of China, so the Chinese had to cultivate industry over a period of decades. Given that most of the worlds manufacturing is done there now, I’d say they’ve been quite successful.
- BurningFrog 5y agoSure, but that only happened after they abandoned the communist economic system. Under Mao, it was constant famine, genocides, and wars.
- alkonaut 5y agoSo what we are saying is that the dropping of socialism and adoption of capitalism lifted 800 million people out of poverty in a generation? I don't think that's a bad review of capitalism at all.
- logicchains 5y agoEven by official Chinese numbers ~10 million is a pretty low estimate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward Wikipedia has it as "between 15 and 55 million" deaths just to the Great Leap Forward alone.
- wayoutthere 5y agoYeah, that’s what happens when you try to undo 200 years of colonial rule. It’s actually a surprisingly low number as a percentage of population when compared to Russia or Eastern Europe.
- logicchains 5y agoThat's ridiculous. Most of the deaths were due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward; how could any part of that be justified as "undoing 200 years of colonial rule"? That wasn't even a justification used by the Commmunist Party at the time.
- wayoutthere 5y agoThere’s no playbook for undoing colonial rule at mass scale. Said colonial rule prevented China from participating in the industrial revolution, so converting an agrarian economy to an industrial one is in fact undoing colonial rule. So yeah, they made mistakes and a lot of people died. I’m not going to glorify Mao but you can’t argue with results. The Great Leap Forward largely succeeded, they just realized it needed to be rolled out at a smaller scale over a longer period of time.
- logicchains 5y agoBy what metric did it succeed? China's GDP per capita is still around a quarter of comparable countries like Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.
- janeroe 5y agoWell, when the youth wing of Lumumbians started practicing a nutritionary democracy (that is, murdered and had a nurse from the West for dinner) this was exactly the justification used by the socialists. "They are undoing the colonial rule", -- they said. That's even more ridiculous and yet they find this theory convincing. So, I don't think it can be helped.
- fallingknife 5y ago
- throwaway316943 5y agoThis comment reads like dialogue from a character in a Philip K. Dick novel.
- bordercases 5y agoThey eventually moved to a capitalist economic system with totalitarian tendencies, no different than the mafia if the mafia were technocrats.
- automatic6131 5y ago>Yeah to everyone who says “communism is fundamentally flawed” I just point to China. As your proof it's flawed, right? Right?
- QuizzicalCarbon 5y agoBy this logic, the USA (a much younger country) is also simply experiencing growing pains, nullifying your point.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoThat's disingenuous. The government of China, People's Republic of China, has only been around since 1949 and even if you include the ROC's mainland tenure that only extends it back to 1912.
- slothtrop 5y agoThey're an Authoritarian Capitalist state.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- xtracto 5y agoExactly! One should not confound their economic model (communism, capitalist, socialist) with their governing model (authoritarian, democratic). Their decisions to massacre people are purely authoritarian, while their economic policies look very capitalist. Sure, they have some socialist policies, but so do Norway, Germany and Mexico.
- edoceo 5y agoWho's they? USA or China or ...?
- danuker 5y agoCheck out this story. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/social-injustice/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/social-injustice/ TL;DR: a thought experiment: for an exam, take the average of every student's grade, and give it to all students. By, say, the 3rd exam, all of the class will fail.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoWhat does an apocryphal story about a highly simplified and disingenuous demonstration of socialism have to do with anything?
- bordercases 5y agoThe logic generalizes fairly well to the problems you have with all collective goods. Unless everyone acts optimally from the goodness of their hearts, which no one does, to shunt the load of producing the collective good, you need coercion, since at that point there is no individual incentive to contribute to a collective good if others are doing so. This is true for unions and undergrad experiments, as it is for centralized planning states, which unsurprisingly are often oppressive dictatorships. If you want to eliminate the need for coercion (which bears long-running costs onto the state), you need to appeal to individual selfishness, which implies competition. As markets have their own problems, you ultimately need a mixed-economy state, something China has become despite its communist roots, and ditto the USA despite its uber-capitalism. The economist Mancur Olson goes into this dynamic of collective action for Western states and beyond. He attempts to explain the general case of the rise and fall of efficiency in capitalist nations, as well as the outlier performance of some communist nations (all short-run) despite this model. https://www.amazon.ca/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation-Rigidities/dp/0300030797 https://www.amazon.ca/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation-Rigid... https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0465051952 https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0465051952 Cultural upbringing can make up some of the difference, but only in small scales or when the groups are tight-knit. Even in China, where on the surface Confucian culture totalizes the individual to the collective, there is also a culture of skillful deception and intrigue in Chinese politics that has flourished domestically and abroad in the 21st century.
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- fighterpilot 5y agoChina got lifted out of poverty after they abandoned communism and transitioned to a mixed economy with respect for private property rights. So I'm not sure what your point is.
- andrewclunn 5y agoIt matters WHICH elite are in charge though, and this batch of Western power elite have no actually loyalty to any given country. China differs from the Soviets in that it's Nationalistic Communism (although perhaps National Socialism is a better term now). What international communism and global capitalism have in common is the destruction of any sense of national sovereignty. If the people of the world are to avoid neo feudal slavery in the coming century, then somewhat paradoxically we need to realize that we all do better, when we realize that we are not all in this together all the time, and that local and regional power structures are better at responding to the actual needs of their people.
- eplanit 5y agoThe CCP has grown to be so effective that they're managing ours, too.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoThe promise was that we would bring democracy to China. I think the opposite happened to a large extent. It's like doing business with the cartel, you're bound to get corrupted.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]