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Comment by beginningguava | Hacker News Reader

It's called national socialism. Nobody wants to say it but modern China has essentially copied the economic system of Nazi Germany. Capitalism is simply a tool to be used rather than some great ideal of free markets and competition. You can see it by the way they criticize the US for protectionism while actively being the most protectionist country on earth.

The way EV's have been forced is similar to how Hitler created Volkswagen, the People's Car. Hitler wanted an affordable German made car for the German citizens.

They've copied it right down to the extreme ethnic self-interest if the Muslim concentration camps are any indicator and the fact that foreigners aren't allowed to own companies in China. Also copying the seizing of neighboring lands.

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That is an apt analogy even if most people aren't going to be able to process and discuss it earnestly. You can extend the analogy even further with China's approach to social engineering, they actively pursue the censorship of content they deem socially harmful (such as pornography) as much as they pursue the censorship of dissident political content.

It's interesting to see an authoritarian government use tools normally associated with poltical oppression to enforce social mores. Whether you believe those social mores are positive or not doesn't really matter to the part I find interesting and that is the questions and moral quandaries posed by the use of such powerful tools to ostensibly change society for the better. That is a subject that has gone completely ignored and undiscussed in the Western world. That's concerning because we're watching a live demo occur in the world's most populous nation but no one is talking about it.

None of that is new, though; the social liberalism of Western countries is a relatively recent and localized aberration. Censorship of socially harmful content was and is very common, particularly in more religious countries (which describes basically all for most of history, and many nowadays).

I'd say that's the fascist and corporatist roots of Nazism, rather than Nazism itself. Franco, Salazar and such were all critics of liberal capitalism as well, and market participation within their countries was heavily controlled and managed.

Of course, all countries are to some extent. The US government wanted cheap mortgages, so it created Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac; it wanted cheap education loans, so it created Sallie Mae; it wanted a strong internal agricultural production, so it created the Farm Credit System; etc. And the EU is certainly not lacking in such mechanisms.

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