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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

Eh. I think we'd like to believe that, mostly because we don't want to face the possibility that China's system might work out fine.

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I wish I knew more about Chinese history. They have about 4K years of institutional memory to draw on and they likely are more aware of their history than we are of ours in the West.

> They have about 4K years of institutional memory

So does Greece. That doesn't appear to be doing Greece much good in the modern era though.

Also, large swaths of China's institutional memory were wiped out during the Cultural Revolution.

Don't mistake institutional and cultural memory, which are not the same thing! A memory in the intellectual elite sense, and a political cultural memory, and a widespread low-cultural set of norms and understandings are also different things. All apart from the institutions of state, or religion, or bureaucracy, or commerce, and so on, which may have traditions and functional memory going back decades or millennia, depending.

That being the case, modern China has an institutional memory going back decades, maybe a century at most. It's nowhere near 4k years.

The CCP is largely defined by rejection, destruction, and denial of the majority of that institutional memory.

That's the Cultural Revolution.

The Cultural Revolution is the one aspect of Maoism that everyone in China today, including the government, will admit was a terrible idea.

For the past 30 years, pundits have been saying China will fail. If they keep saying it, maybe they'll be right eventually.

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