Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I hear someone claim china is leading on the environment, I know they’ve never been there before.

Your analysis is harsh, however: there are still rich people left who haven’t migrated. China is all developed, developing, and undeveloped at the same time...it is a huge place after all. There is plenty of trouble on the Chinese eceonomy to work through, and the propaganda is incredulous, but they have made a lot of progress that isn’t going to go away even when the inevitable crash comes.

China could go through a decade or two of Japanese-style stagnation if they refuse to reform and allow the market to work out bad economic blood with crashes and failures. They could also go the other way, focus on real growth and start avoiding white elephants. Let’s see.

View on HN

I agree that there's a ton of progress in conjunction with troubles of growth. However, I think they're past the point of no return with the reform; if they did the reforms when the stock market crashed a few years ago, that could've been different. But now you can see that the communist party is avoiding that pain completely (just like Japan in 1990) and trying to inflate the worries away. However, pegging to dollar and capital outflow is preventing them from doing that successfully (while Japan had the fortune of doing the inflation in the 90s when the world economy was healthy). Along with XiJingPing becoming a dictator, it doesn't bode well at all for China.

They haven’t really been inflating their way out of their debt problems. It’s more like lending money out, which almost immediately goes into inflated asset bubbles anyways. If you aren’t buying a house, you wouldn’t even notice.

Ya, there will be a bunch of losers when things go south, but wealth has been so concentrated that the number of losers will also be. Ya, it will be bad, but totally recoverable as most of what is lost was never really gained in the first place.

Xi isn’t really a dictator yet, he is the most powerful leader since Jiang Zemin, which is saying he is just stronger than Hu jintao. People forget that this isn’t much of a change, that the Hu era was just an exception.

> If you aren’t buying a house, you wouldn’t even notice.

I can't think of anyone I know that did not want to buy a house. It's a prerequisite for getting married. It's a prerequisite for having your kids get married. It's an investment vehicle. It's a store of value. It's all everyone talks about. Besides, rents have been going up everywhere.

> but wealth has been so concentrated that the number of losers will also be

These would-be losers are communist party bosses. I'm sure the peasants will feel the pain, not the bosses

> Xi isn’t really a dictator yet

https://qz.com/1112527/chinas-19th-party-congress-how-xi-jin...

https://www.economist.com/news/china/21590499-chinas-preside...

Rents have been going up, but not as much as housing. An apartment that rents for 10k RMB/month will cost 7 million RMB to buy (about $1 million usd), that is just an insane rent to purchase ratio. We foreigners don’t need to buy anyways, and find rents even in Shenzhen quite reasonable. Anyone who bought after 2011, or maybe even 2006, will feel the pain, but at least it will be market based.

You are right that it will depend on if they take their losses themselves or force the people to take it. But they really can’t handle that much worker unrest, I’m sure they’ll eat it, or better yet, have a corruption campaign and get their political enemies to take most of the losses (then it will depend on who has power when the bubble pops).

The CCP has been a dictatorship (oligarchy) for half a century, THEY chose Xi as THEIR new leader.

It is definitely an autocracy, but it isn’t a dictatorship (well, they call it a dictatorship of the people). My point is that Xi’s power is nowhere near absolute, there are plenty of king makers behind the scene that duke it out with each other, Xi is just an obvious one.

Any dictatorship has a ruling coalition, so I think you are making an artificial distinction. What keeps a dictator in power is his/hers ability to compensate their ruling coalition to keep in place a system where you do not have to rule in the best interest of the majority.

A core tenet for a successful dictator is the power and willingness to replace anyone that acts against your interest with someone from a large pool of replacements. A dictatorship also only thrive when most people are relatively uneducated so that they can't challenge you and that most people do not have enough resources to afford dissidence.

If you want to learn more about the topic "The Dictators Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics" is highly recommended.

Maybe we are just being pedantic, but it sounds like you are looking for autocracy. I would class china’s system as more aristocratic now with multiple red families running most of the politics and much of the economy. But even that isn’t exactly right, china’s political system is difficult to categorize.

On second thought I think you are right that it is its own thing. I do not remember the details, but political scientist Fukuyama classifies the Chinese political system in "The Origins of Political Order" and due to the cultural context it has many unique properties.

You don't understand the economics of what you're saying. The "capital outflows" are largely a myth.

Quite a few large cities around the world would like to disagree with you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com