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China has become more and more authoritarian under Xi, its GDP growth stats may be dodgy, and recently its housing bubble has popped big-style. It could go the

• feedforward 2y ago
  People were saying when the PRC was founded 75 years ago it would collapse any day now. They were saying this during the cultural revolution. They were saying it earlier this year, as China sent a robot to the far side of the moon to collect moon rocks and bring them back to earth. And they're still saying it. I'm not holding my breath.
  • doctorpangloss 2y ago
    There are HN posters with the ability to see hard data inside America's largest tech and manufacturing businesses, but don't investigate the question, "How much of what you buy every day was made in China?"
  • kiba 2y ago
    Just because PRC didn't collapse doesn't mean PRC perform well. On the contrary, the current strength of PRC is probably a reversion to mean, what China would be like if it wasn't so mismanaged, and yet decades late from where they could be. States can endure a lot of mismanagement. Look at North Korea for instance. What we won't know is when we hit the breaking point. What is happening in Russia may lead to an eventual collapse, though unlikely. There are some signs of a loss of monopoly on violence as the system is pushed to its breaking point. Hopefully that won't happen, but it's a scary possibility nonetheless.
• zorked 2y ago
  China is the #1 trading partner of nearly every country in the world. That's all you need to know about how bad they are doing.
• MichaelZuo 2y ago
  How do you know this? I don’t want to single this out but tangible proof of a net increase in ‘authoritarian’ decision making, compared to say a decade ago, has never been posted on HN, as far as I know. Most of the in depth analysis I’ve seen suggests that although enforcement actions have become stricter over the past decade, the actual number of new laws and regulations has gone down. And more importantly, the number of contradictory laws and regulations (between central authorities, and between the centre and provinces) has gone way way down. So there’s much less leeway to punish on a whim or trap someone in a double bind, compared to a decade ago. Which suggests a net decrease, if anything.
  • vlovich123 2y ago
    It depends on if you’re talking about authoritarianism as it relates to the average person or the political and ruling class. There have been a lot of reports of Xi getting rid of a lot of potential adversaries when he announced himself ruler for life and the imprisonment of Jack Ma and stripping him of his wealth for making challenging statements against Xi seems pretty authoritarian.
    • MichaelZuo 2y ago
      Does it makes sense to discuss it relative to the ‘political and ruling class’? Since they pretty much all have party cards already. And the moment they give it up means they’re kicked out from any decision making, from what I understand. Yes internal factions within the party can arbitrarily punish each other for made up reasons all day long, every day of the year. So in a sense it was already authoritarian without limit. But that’s not new, nor different from any other big political party.
      • vlovich123 2y ago
        The kind of punishment authoritarian regimes dish out is much more severe in ways that you couldn’t do in the US (imprisonment, seizure of assets, death). In fact I’d argue it’s the only kind that matters. Authoritarian regimes rarely go after normal people unless they speak out actively against the government (which China does) and instead focus on controlling and censoring anyone in a position of power and let the implicit censoring of the entire population flow downstream from that.