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China has course-corrected many times before. They’ll do it again. I think the US should be more worried. Their govt makes it incredibly hard to course-correct

China has course-corrected many times before. They’ll do it again. I think the US should be more worried. Their govt makes it incredibly hard to course-correct (filibuster, gerrymandering, fptp, electoral college, supreme court etc) https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart Trends look better for China. Life expectancy already caught up.

inglor_cz 1y ago
I would argue that with the exception of the American Civil War, internal course corrections of the US during the last 250 years were a lot less violent than those of China. The Taiping Rebellion, the White Lotus Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution - lots of deaths and chaos involved. (I omitted the civil war between CCP and the Kuomintag, which I consider roughly equivalent to the ACW.)
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  The past is the past. Sometimes it is a good predictor of the future, other times people learn the lessons of mistakes, making the past anti-correlated.
  - nradov 1y ago
    The history of China going back millennia is chock full of violent revolutions and civil wars. They don't seem to learn anything from mistakes. I fully expect another one in our lifetimes.
    - codedokode 1y ago
      You should look at European history for comparison. I don't remember, what did they have, a 100 or 200-year war?
      - nradov 1y ago
        Yes, Europeans are equally unable to learn from their mistakes.
        mallowdram 1y ago
        You should grasp that China has maintained a civilization through line for 5K years. No other state comes close. The question is how.
        s1artibartfast 1y ago
        What does that even mean and how does it compare to any other place that is inhabited by humans?
        nradov 1y ago
        Civilization has been maintained in other places such as Egypt for just as long. You can argue about the degree of continuity but the modern nation state of China bears almost no resemblance to what existed on the same territory 5K years ago. So I don't understand what point you're trying to make.
- grafmax 1y ago
  Almost as if countries were closed systems and imperialism never existed. As if the US has not acted a neo-imperialist superpower post-WW2. Surely a country’s positionality in the global system contributes to how much violence occurs within their borders?
  - inglor_cz 1y ago
    "Surely a country’s positionality in the global system contributes to how much violence occurs within their borders?" Surely, but how much? 1 per cent or 40 per cent? We don't know. As you say, nothing is a closed system. For example, by 1949, China imported Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist school of thought, a totally culturally alien system constructed by (mostly long dead) Europeans, which was the root cause of the horrors of the Maoist era - none of which were imposed by external empires by force. For all its faults, the US never forced the Chinese to exterminate the sparrows or attempt to build a steel mill in every village, resulting in a massive economic collapse and death toll.
    - grafmax 1y ago
      China had many famines before that during the century of humiliation. Maoism was itself a reaction to the dire social conditions of the time. This doesn’t absolve Maoism of its policies which led to millions dying. (And yet we shouldn’t absolve the global capitalist system either which leads to millions of preventable deaths each year.) Colonialist exploitation has been major historic driver over this timeframe (shifting to neo-colonialism in the world system post WW2). Admittedly it hasn’t been the only one. But our understanding of world history loses nuance if we gloss over colonialism and neo-colonialism over this period and treat historic events as due to the supposedly essential traits of this or that nation.
      - inglor_cz 1y ago
        It seems that famines in China were commonplace even pre-19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China Political system may be one of the reasons (feudalism doesn't have a great record in preventing famines either), but the most salient explanation might be that a pre-modern economy with high density of population is inherently prone to famines - a bad drought will easily topple the precarious balance between demand and supply towards lack of food, and without a railway network it is nearly impossible to move food easily among places that don't have good ports.
Der_Einzige 1y ago
Americans will beat out China again in 20 years due to GLP-1 drugs fixing the colossal nerfing to our public health that widespread obesity cause. Of course, China has another chance to beat us out when that happens if they do something about how common smoking is there!
- YinglingHeavy 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - Der_Einzige 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - dang 1y ago
      Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait generally? You've been doing it repeatedly and we've asked you many times not to.
  - dang 1y ago
    Please don't cross into personal attack or name-calling, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. You can make your substantive points without any of that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dragonelite 1y ago
  The US problem is they are going from a global brutal empire to a shrinking empire. But the debt and lifestyle of the US is still that of a global empire. That is what has broken many past empires and will break the US empire.
christkv 1y ago
Compared to Europe the US has turbo speed of self-correction. EU is not doing well and it will do worse over the next decade and there seems to be no political will to put the economy back on course. Just add more regulations, costs and spending and hope for the best seems the current mantra. Right now corporate bonds are sold at lower rates and have better credit than the public bonds for a country like France. Combination of no faith in political stability and no faith in the ability to get spending under control. I think a lot of EU countries are going to just keep stumbling into a financial crisis that will force cuts in pensions and wealth-fare at a scale not seen post ww2. The pyramid scheme is coming due.
- mallowdram 1y ago
  The US doesn't course-correct, it barrels through when the outcome is appalling (1933) and when the leadership takes advantage of a break in the pattern (1964/1981). The immobility of the US political system indicates it is ready to be broken in half, the reality of corporatocracy is that it is an endgame to itself in arbitrariness. Whereas all China has to do is exert its state economy leverage once the West's corporations/bonds evaporate. The Chinese see resonance, interdependence, relationships. It's baked into their language. We see attributes, objects, units, individuals. We imposed these onto their businesses for the last 30 years, but don't think for a second we've dominated their culture. They are now far more able to use their language's inherent forms as guides to the economy.
  - christkv 1y ago
    You are to captured by your ideology. It does not really matter what you personally think about. The thing is that the EU has completely failed as a union to provide the economic growth we need and has no plan on how to address this. We are completely export dependent (about 50% of GDP, meaning any world economic crisis will cause massive unemployment and fiscal crisis) and our internal market has withered and the purchasing power is plummeting. China is going to do what China does but it's economy is in tatters something you would probably know if you actually looked at what is happening with their economy. Combine that with the same demographic crisis as EU and you have another country that might have already hit it's economical peak. The leadership is showing no ability to create an internal market and is busy stomping out any dissent internally as economical reality sets in and people loose jobs and their future. Unless their turn their economy around creating an internal market any international economic crisis will collapse their export oriented economy.
legacynl 1y ago
Lol, advocating for an autocratic system because they can pivot fast. If a less fortunate Chinese citizen would be allowed to speak their mind I'm pretty sure they would have a way less favourable opinion, even if the CCP would have 'great stats' in the international press (which at least partly is based on data they provide).
- John23832 1y ago
  Civil liberties isn't the point being made, it's whether you scan steer a huge ship. Which, to the credit of the original commenter, China has proven they can do.
  - dwaltrip 1y ago
    Did they steer the ship well during covid?
    - John23832 1y ago
      The gotcha's don't work on me, sorry. They've steered a massive ship (and its crew) well enough to corner the manufacturing market for everything, globally, in less than 30 years. They've steered that same ship well enough to create mirror (and sometimes superior) industries in pretty much everything else. They also created global soft power in the process. If they need to retool/manage gig work, the command and control economy in China has a much better chance at figuring it out than waiting for the "hand of the market" in US.
      - onetokeoverthe 1y ago
        [dead]
      - throwaway173738 1y ago
        In many ways the US is just returning to the approach to governance from the time of Upton Sinclair.
      - 1y ago
nradov 1y ago
The "official" data reported by China can't be attempted to be believed. Most of it is highly manipulated. Attempts at independent verification are punished, or blocked by making the raw data a state secret. That's not to say that data reported by other countries is completely accurate or free of political manipulation. But there's a enormous difference between China and democratic countries.
- bdangubic 1y ago
  there isn’t, especially not in america (though you said democratic… :) )
- monero-xmr 1y ago
  There is a bizarre reverence and worship for China I have observed with some Americans. Yes, you can build things faster and have smooth 5% YoY growth if you don’t have property rights and manipulate the statistics
  - cpursley 1y ago
    90% of Chinese own their own properties vs 65% of Americans, so there's that. Regarding property rights, I'm not sure how it works there but we've all seen the malls and highways that diverted around homes where owners were unwilling to sell out. Also, they actually have functional public infrastructure and have brought something like 800 million out of abject poverty. Are ahead of us in several spaces and about to pass us or at least equal us in others. Obviously I'm not arguing for that type of top down authoritarian system, but this is the objective reality. What's bizarre actually is all the denialism and copium over China - should we not be glad that they are doing better than they were 30 years ago and much more liberal than before?
    - monero-xmr 1y ago
      Give the average person in china the opportunity to move to America, and vice versa, there is no comparison. China has done some things right but to pretend it is some model for America is absurd
nextworddev 1y ago
Is this a LLM posting?
- Herring 1y ago
  Negative, I am a meat popsicle.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
megraf 1y ago
保管国家机密。你的社交信用评分下降了。
- frm88 1y ago
  By 2023, most private social credit initiatives had been shut down by the People's Bank of China, and regulations had cracked down on most local scoring pilot programs.[16]: 12 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
paulddraper 1y ago
As opposed to…dictatorship? That’s your point? It’s not like China has ranked choice voting.
mensetmanusman 1y ago
Their course corrections can take centuries and many tens of millions of dead from killing birds and bugs.

inglor_cz 1y ago

I would argue that with the exception of the American Civil War, internal course corrections of the US during the last 250 years were a lot less violent than those of China. The Taiping Rebellion, the White Lotus Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution - lots of deaths and chaos involved. (I omitted the civil war between CCP and the Kuomintag, which I consider roughly equivalent to the ACW.)

bryanlarsen 1y ago
The past is the past. Sometimes it is a good predictor of the future, other times people learn the lessons of mistakes, making the past anti-correlated.
- nradov 1y ago
  The history of China going back millennia is chock full of violent revolutions and civil wars. They don't seem to learn anything from mistakes. I fully expect another one in our lifetimes.
  - codedokode 1y ago
    You should look at European history for comparison. I don't remember, what did they have, a 100 or 200-year war?
    - nradov 1y ago
      Yes, Europeans are equally unable to learn from their mistakes.
      - mallowdram 1y ago
        You should grasp that China has maintained a civilization through line for 5K years. No other state comes close. The question is how.
        s1artibartfast 1y ago
        What does that even mean and how does it compare to any other place that is inhabited by humans?
        nradov 1y ago
        Civilization has been maintained in other places such as Egypt for just as long. You can argue about the degree of continuity but the modern nation state of China bears almost no resemblance to what existed on the same territory 5K years ago. So I don't understand what point you're trying to make.
grafmax 1y ago
Almost as if countries were closed systems and imperialism never existed. As if the US has not acted a neo-imperialist superpower post-WW2. Surely a country’s positionality in the global system contributes to how much violence occurs within their borders?
- inglor_cz 1y ago
  "Surely a country’s positionality in the global system contributes to how much violence occurs within their borders?" Surely, but how much? 1 per cent or 40 per cent? We don't know. As you say, nothing is a closed system. For example, by 1949, China imported Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist school of thought, a totally culturally alien system constructed by (mostly long dead) Europeans, which was the root cause of the horrors of the Maoist era - none of which were imposed by external empires by force. For all its faults, the US never forced the Chinese to exterminate the sparrows or attempt to build a steel mill in every village, resulting in a massive economic collapse and death toll.
  - grafmax 1y ago
    China had many famines before that during the century of humiliation. Maoism was itself a reaction to the dire social conditions of the time. This doesn’t absolve Maoism of its policies which led to millions dying. (And yet we shouldn’t absolve the global capitalist system either which leads to millions of preventable deaths each year.) Colonialist exploitation has been major historic driver over this timeframe (shifting to neo-colonialism in the world system post WW2). Admittedly it hasn’t been the only one. But our understanding of world history loses nuance if we gloss over colonialism and neo-colonialism over this period and treat historic events as due to the supposedly essential traits of this or that nation.
    - inglor_cz 1y ago
      It seems that famines in China were commonplace even pre-19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China Political system may be one of the reasons (feudalism doesn't have a great record in preventing famines either), but the most salient explanation might be that a pre-modern economy with high density of population is inherently prone to famines - a bad drought will easily topple the precarious balance between demand and supply towards lack of food, and without a railway network it is nearly impossible to move food easily among places that don't have good ports.

Der_Einzige 1y ago

Americans will beat out China again in 20 years due to GLP-1 drugs fixing the colossal nerfing to our public health that widespread obesity cause. Of course, China has another chance to beat us out when that happens if they do something about how common smoking is there!

YinglingHeavy 1y ago
[flagged]
- Der_Einzige 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 1y ago
    Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait generally? You've been doing it repeatedly and we've asked you many times not to.
- dang 1y ago
  Please don't cross into personal attack or name-calling, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. You can make your substantive points without any of that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dragonelite 1y ago
The US problem is they are going from a global brutal empire to a shrinking empire. But the debt and lifestyle of the US is still that of a global empire. That is what has broken many past empires and will break the US empire.

christkv 1y ago

Compared to Europe the US has turbo speed of self-correction. EU is not doing well and it will do worse over the next decade and there seems to be no political will to put the economy back on course. Just add more regulations, costs and spending and hope for the best seems the current mantra. Right now corporate bonds are sold at lower rates and have better credit than the public bonds for a country like France. Combination of no faith in political stability and no faith in the ability to get spending under control. I think a lot of EU countries are going to just keep stumbling into a financial crisis that will force cuts in pensions and wealth-fare at a scale not seen post ww2. The pyramid scheme is coming due.

mallowdram 1y ago
The US doesn't course-correct, it barrels through when the outcome is appalling (1933) and when the leadership takes advantage of a break in the pattern (1964/1981). The immobility of the US political system indicates it is ready to be broken in half, the reality of corporatocracy is that it is an endgame to itself in arbitrariness. Whereas all China has to do is exert its state economy leverage once the West's corporations/bonds evaporate. The Chinese see resonance, interdependence, relationships. It's baked into their language. We see attributes, objects, units, individuals. We imposed these onto their businesses for the last 30 years, but don't think for a second we've dominated their culture. They are now far more able to use their language's inherent forms as guides to the economy.
- christkv 1y ago
  You are to captured by your ideology. It does not really matter what you personally think about. The thing is that the EU has completely failed as a union to provide the economic growth we need and has no plan on how to address this. We are completely export dependent (about 50% of GDP, meaning any world economic crisis will cause massive unemployment and fiscal crisis) and our internal market has withered and the purchasing power is plummeting. China is going to do what China does but it's economy is in tatters something you would probably know if you actually looked at what is happening with their economy. Combine that with the same demographic crisis as EU and you have another country that might have already hit it's economical peak. The leadership is showing no ability to create an internal market and is busy stomping out any dissent internally as economical reality sets in and people loose jobs and their future. Unless their turn their economy around creating an internal market any international economic crisis will collapse their export oriented economy.

legacynl 1y ago

Lol, advocating for an autocratic system because they can pivot fast. If a less fortunate Chinese citizen would be allowed to speak their mind I'm pretty sure they would have a way less favourable opinion, even if the CCP would have 'great stats' in the international press (which at least partly is based on data they provide).

John23832 1y ago
Civil liberties isn't the point being made, it's whether you scan steer a huge ship. Which, to the credit of the original commenter, China has proven they can do.
- dwaltrip 1y ago
  Did they steer the ship well during covid?
  - John23832 1y ago
    The gotcha's don't work on me, sorry. They've steered a massive ship (and its crew) well enough to corner the manufacturing market for everything, globally, in less than 30 years. They've steered that same ship well enough to create mirror (and sometimes superior) industries in pretty much everything else. They also created global soft power in the process. If they need to retool/manage gig work, the command and control economy in China has a much better chance at figuring it out than waiting for the "hand of the market" in US.
    - onetokeoverthe 1y ago
      [dead]
    - throwaway173738 1y ago
      In many ways the US is just returning to the approach to governance from the time of Upton Sinclair.
    - 1y ago

nradov 1y ago

The "official" data reported by China can't be attempted to be believed. Most of it is highly manipulated. Attempts at independent verification are punished, or blocked by making the raw data a state secret. That's not to say that data reported by other countries is completely accurate or free of political manipulation. But there's a enormous difference between China and democratic countries.

bdangubic 1y ago
there isn’t, especially not in america (though you said democratic… :) )
monero-xmr 1y ago
There is a bizarre reverence and worship for China I have observed with some Americans. Yes, you can build things faster and have smooth 5% YoY growth if you don’t have property rights and manipulate the statistics
- cpursley 1y ago
  90% of Chinese own their own properties vs 65% of Americans, so there's that. Regarding property rights, I'm not sure how it works there but we've all seen the malls and highways that diverted around homes where owners were unwilling to sell out. Also, they actually have functional public infrastructure and have brought something like 800 million out of abject poverty. Are ahead of us in several spaces and about to pass us or at least equal us in others. Obviously I'm not arguing for that type of top down authoritarian system, but this is the objective reality. What's bizarre actually is all the denialism and copium over China - should we not be glad that they are doing better than they were 30 years ago and much more liberal than before?
  - monero-xmr 1y ago
    Give the average person in china the opportunity to move to America, and vice versa, there is no comparison. China has done some things right but to pretend it is some model for America is absurd

nextworddev 1y ago

Is this a LLM posting?

Herring 1y ago
Negative, I am a meat popsicle.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

megraf 1y ago

保管国家机密。你的社交信用评分下降了。

frm88 1y ago
By 2023, most private social credit initiatives had been shut down by the People's Bank of China, and regulations had cracked down on most local scoring pilot programs.[16]: 12 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

paulddraper 1y ago

As opposed to…dictatorship? That’s your point? It’s not like China has ranked choice voting.

mensetmanusman 1y ago

Their course corrections can take centuries and many tens of millions of dead from killing birds and bugs.