Comment by JonFish85 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JonFish85 | Hacker News Reader

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Remember that the Chinese government doesn't have to deal with a lot of what the United States' government does have to: things like local governments and our election system. Our government is not set up to move quickly (by design!): our government can't decide to shut down thousands of businesses for a day without consequences, and for good reason.

Americans have set up their government so that it more or less reflects the will of the people, and the relatively educated American public is not OK with the government taking drastic steps very quickly. For better or for worse, the Chinese government can move extremely quickly because they essentially answer to no one; if the government wants to raze a neighborhood for something, they do it. If they want to build a road, they move whatever's in the way and build it. In some ways it's incredibly efficient. But that's something the US government is not optimized for, and I'm personally glad for that.

>Americans have set up their government so that it more or less reflects the will of the people

I patently disagree with this opinion. Between lobbyist money and "news" agencies blatantly lying to groups of people not educated enough to fact check what they're hearing on the news, the government very much does NOT reflect the will of the people. It reflects the will of a handful of extremely wealthy people, and large corporations seeking profits at the expense of *.

That's part of the will of the people. Their will is influenced by those parties you identified but it's still their will. It's like saying Christians go to church against their will because because their parents brainwashed them when they were children, and them in turn back many generations to a time when it was done for the political power of extremely wealthy people.

If Americans didn't want lobbyists or dishonest news, they would vote to ban lobbyists and not watch the dishonest news. But they choose to keep those things in a kind of self-reinforcing feedback loop.

>It's like saying Christians go to church against their will because because their parents brainwashed them when they were children, and them in turn back many generations to a time when it was done for the political power of extremely wealthy people.

You realize that's actually a provable thing, right? That it's significantly harder to break that cycle when it's introduced at a young age because it forces children to remove their parents from the pedestal they're naturally placed on.

You say that as though you think it's just something people make up, when there's actual provable science behind it.

The Chinese very much have local government, and they lack many of the tools we have to centrally manage those local governments, in part because their central government is not at all transparent. The other issue is that only 6% of their government employees are at the central level. The US? 12%. EU? 14%.

The Chinese have a saying for this: the mountains are high, and the Emperor is far away.

Xi actually comes predominantly from the reformer branch of the Chinese political house. I think his biggest challenge is that his precedessors grew China too quickly.

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