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Comment by westiseast | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with why Western commentators struggle to accept China’s ‘success’ - it’s not sour grapes or jealousy as you suggest.

China is breaking all of the established rules that have guided western societies for decades/centuries: Governments work for the people. Authoritarianism doesn’t work. Faking and copying will fail. Hubris leads to a fall.

China’s political model and economic models have worked exceptionally well on a number of levels for 3-4 decades now, but to a lot of people, it still just looks like an authoritarian government forcing present and future generations to make vast sacrifices (health, quality of life, freedoms, rights) for the benefit of the CCP.

Time will tell.

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You do have a point here. I think it's mostly due to the fact there's very little information about China available on Western media, so people just do not have access to the latest insights. This explains why most of them are still operating based on old beliefs.

Ironically this is probably serving China even better as they were able to keep everything undetected that it often becomes too late by the time people notice what's going on. Huawei is such a perfect example of this.

That just sounds like another way of saying we should be learning from this. Even if the trade offs aren’t worth it for us we shouldn’t be surprised when stuff that “shouldn’t work” does in fact work.

Maybe - the neoliberal dogma of the last 40 years has been that you can’t have economic prosperity without democratic reform and liberal politics. China has shown categorically that this isn’t true.

However, China might still prove the West correct in the long term. The breakneck economic development and oppressive political system has stored up a lot of huge problems, any of which could see the country slump into serious decline or worse.

> China might still prove the West correct in the long term. The breakneck economic development and oppressive political system has stored up a lot of huge problems, any of which could see the country slump into serious decline or worse.

I don't see how China can develop into the next phase of economic development with such an oppressive system. Industry and constrained science can clearly advance under such control. But media, branding, and cultural influence are much more strongly hindered by an oppressive state.

Before China can shift from building products and things into building brands and ideas, they will need to open up their society to compete globally.

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