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Comment by 5trokerac3 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine this article being written in the 1930s and you know exactly the city they'd be writing about. You should be equally disgusted by the assertion that this totalitarian regime's city is the "city of the future".

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I think that's the point. All the things that made early 20th-century New York great are happening in Shanghai now and at a much larger scale. That it's happening in a country under a totalitarian regime is not in line with Western sensibilities, but the assertion itself is reasonable and pretty objective if you've visited Shanghai recently.

It's an amazing city that (in startup terms) still has a growth mindset. New York, London, San Francisco and other Western cities behave like they've grown about as much as they want to.

It's only amazing, even in startup terms, if you're Han and toe the line. Imagine being a Uighur trying to make in in Shanghai.

Pretty sure OP is referring to 1930's Nazi Germany and not NYC.

I hadn’t considered that. It certainly changes my perspective on the comment, but I think my response is still germane; we used to have the political will to build cities (even in liberal democracies) but now we are pretty much in maintenance mode, at least as far as great cities are concerned.

It's funny how nobody calls China a fascist regime.

I don't know why you're being downvoted. Once China switched to a market economy they became communist in name only. A totalitarian regime that asserts its dominance over private, market based industry is the textbook definition of fascism.

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